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THE PROBLEMS 
OF THE WAR- 
SP THE PEACE 

Al Handbook y#r Students 
By NORMAN ANGELL 




PRICE SIXPENCE 



LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



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THE PROBLEMS of the WAR 
—AND THE PEACE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE GREAT ILLUSION : a 

Study of the Relation of Military- 
Power to National Advantage. 
Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d. net. 

PRUSSIANISM AND ITS DE- 
STRUCTION, with which is 
reprinted Part II. of " The Great 
Illusion/' Crown 8vo, paper, 
is. net. 

THE FOUNDATIONS OF IN- 
TERNATIONAL POLITY. 

Demy 8vo, 3s. 6d. net. 



LONDON : WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



THE PROBLEMS 
OF THE WAR— 
& THE PEACE 

A Handbook for Students 
By NORMAN ANGELL 

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT ILLUSION" 



LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



CONTENTS a 

PART I.— THE CAUSES OF THE 
PRESENT WAR. 

PART II.— THE ROOT CAUSES OF WAR. 

Chapter I. — The Relation of Ideas 
to Social and Political Conduct. 

Chapter II. — The Outstanding 
Failure of Reasoning in Inter- 
national Relationships. 

Chapter III. — Misconceptions as to 
the Nature of Government and the 
Place of Political Authority. 

PART III.— THE NEXT PRACTICAL STEP. 



sYerred frortf 
Librdriao'3 Office. 



THE PROBLEMS OF THE 
WAR— AND THE PEACE. 

PART I. 
THE CAUSES OF THE PRESENT WAR. 

The Superficial Causes. 

THE surface causes of the war were these : The 
heir to the Austrian throne was murdered by 
a political assassin as the result of a long 
agitation against Austria in which the Servian Govern- 
ment was supposed to be implicated ; following the 
assassination came a severe Note from Austria to 
Servia in which the Servian Government was ordered 
to take various strong measures to stamp out the 
agitation against Austria and to allow Austrian 
officials to participate in the work ; Servia not com- 
plying immediately with these orders, Austria declared 
war on Servia ; Russia thereupon told Austria that 
the affairs of Servia were of vital interest to Russia, 
and that Austria must withdraw some of her demands ; 
Austria, supported by her ally Germany, would not 
give way ; Russia mobilised her armies ; Germany 
declared war on Russia ; France was bound by an 
alliance to help Russia, and Great Britain was con- 
sidered bound by an understanding to join France, 
and still more bound by a treaty to defend the 
neutrality of Belgium, which had been violated by 
Germany for the purpose of her attack on France. 

What Lay Behind. 

It is certain that no mere question of the punishment 
of assassins could possibly involve Europe in a titanic 
conflict. Behind that ostensible cause lay the race 



6 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

divisions of the East and the confused struggle of 
opposing groups among the nations. The Germans 
wanted to fight for the domination of Europe or to 
resist the domination of Russia, and Russia wanted to 
assert her position as the natural leader and protector 
of the Slav peoples. 

In the second part of this outline of study there 
is some examination of what is meant by this domi- 
nation and subjugation, and of what either group 
could achieve by it — an enquiry which we must carry 
out thoroughly if we are to understand the real problems 
of war and peace. But in this section it is important 
to get rather at the material facts, and an honest 
examination of those facts seems to show that every- 
one was afraid of everyone else. 

It may be perfectly true that the Prussian military 
caste were determined to impose their rule upon 
Europe ; conceivably it might be true to say the same 
thing of the Russian governing caste. But that is 
not what the rulers of either country told their peoples. 
Germans, as a whole, do not believe that they are 
fighting to make the Prussians masters of Europe (it 
so happens that the Prussians before the war were not 
particularly liked by anyone in the other States of 
Germany), but what the German people are told by 
the military caste and what they believe is that they 
are threatened by the Russians, and that their expan- 
sion is being checked by a network of alliances and 
understandings directed against them. 

Why the Germans Feared Russia. 

The influence exercised over the minds of Germans 
by fear of Russia is a factor which English students of 
the problem generally leave out of account. It cannot 
be left out of account if we are to get at the bottom of 
the material external facts of this war, and understand 
the motives that entered into it. 

Why should the Germans fear Russia ? Well, we 



—AND THE PEACE 7 

ourselves were very much afraid of the expansion of 
Russia until a year or two ago. It is a vast Empire 
covering over 8, 000, 000 square miles, and having under 
its despotic government a population of 170,000,000. 
Figures of this magnitude are meaningless unless one 
can compare them with those of another country ; so 
let us take the area and population of the German 
Empire as a measure. Germany covers 208,000 square 
miles, or one-fortieth of the area covered by Russia, 
while the German population amounts to 65,000,000, 
or about one-third that of Russia. The history of 
Russia during the nineteenth century is described by 
Seignobos, the French historian, as the history of 
the Russian Government's struggle against " several 
groups of peoples united by a series of conquests under 
the same rule, who preserved their own particular 
dress, language, and religion, and lived side by side 
without blending. . . . The Russian Empire was 
thus, like the Austrian Empire, a conglomeration of 
peoples ; a single tie bound them together, subjection 
to the power of the autocratic Tsar, their absolute, 
uncontrolled sovereign." The German Government is 
also to a large extent autocratic, and there is always 
a tendency on the part of autocratic and ambitious 
governments who believe in the advantages of military 
domination to be afraid of the growth of each other's 
power. 

Russia and Great Britain. 
The story of the jealous rivalry between the states- 
men of Russia and the statesmen of Great Britain 
(the people of the two countries took little part in this), 
a rivalry which began in 1830 and has continued down 
almost to the present day, can be read in any history 
book. It arose chiefly out of Russia's expansion in 
Asia, which was believed by some British statesmen 
to menace our position in India, and partly out of 
Russia's natural desire to acquire an ice-free port as 
an outlet for her great inland empire. 



8 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Apart from the supposed Russian menace to India, 
the question at issue between us which is most likely 
to be revived is that of the Dardanelles, a narrow 
strait leading from the Mediterranean to the Sea of 
Marmora, which gives access to the Bosphorus and the 
Black Sea. The British support of Turkey against 
Russia was defended on the ground that Russian 
possession of the Dardanelles would have given her 
the connecting link between Europe and Asia, which 
in bygone days constituted Constantinople a seat of 
empire and the possession of which by Russia would 
have enabled her to threaten the route to India. The 
war (of the Crimea) which arose out of this rivalry, 
and which is now admitted to have been grossly un- 
necessary by men of all parties, is best studied, per- 
haps, in the biographies of the two men who stood 
almost alone in opposition to that war — The Life of 
Richard Cobden, by John Morley, and The Life of John 
Bright, by G. M. Trevelyan. At the present time 
the governments of both countries have come to 
recognise that there is no question of vital interest 
between them, and that the policy of " pinpricks " in 
Asia, which led to so much friction, was altogether a 
mistake. It may be hoped that at the end of the 
present war the question of the Dardanelles may be 
definitely settled, perhaps by their neutralisation. 

The fact remains that we ourselves at one time 
went so much in fear of the growth of Russian power 
as to be led into a war to check it. But if we had any 
ground at all for such fear — any excuse for it — Germany 
had infinitely more excuse for her fear. Her eastern 
frontier is directly exposed to these vast hordes of only 
partially civilised people, under an autocratic govern- 
ment — a people who are as yet undeveloped industrially, 
and therefore largely unaffected by the difficulties 
which confront a highly organised industrial nation, 
like Germany, when war comes. 

When we remember that the Emperor of Russia can 



—AND THE PEACE 9 

call upon nearly two hundred millions of Slavs from 
Asia and from Eastern Europe, we may at least have 
more respect for the German fear of the Slavs than we 
have for the anti-Russian policy of British statesmen 
a generation ago. It must be said, however, that the 
ill-feeling between Russia and Germany, the govern- 
ments of which used to be friendly, is largely due to 
German support of Austria in questions arising out of 
the Balkan problem and Russia's claim to exercise 
protection over the smaller Slav populations. The 
German landowners and merchants have also made 
themselves disliked in Russia, and many liberal 
Russians believe that German influence has been 
partly responsible for the reactionary tendencies of the 
Russian Government. German support of Austrian 
influence against Russian in the Balkans had probably 
more to do than anything else -with breaking up the 
traditional friendship between the Prussian and 
Russian Courts, and this was probably dictated by fear 
that if the Southern Slavs became independent they 
would be under the influence of Russia and would 
make her so powerful as to be dangerous to Germany. 

Germany, France, and Alsace. 

Another cause of fear on the part of Germany was 
the constant menace of the French, who never ceased 
to whisper of revenge — revenge for the defeat of 1870 
and the recapture of Alsace-Lorraine. 

The history of Alsace is a curious one, and makes 
an excellent illustration of the difficulty of finding the 
rightful owner of disputed territory. Alsace was a 
part of Roman Gaul ; it was conquered by the Franks, 
and became part of the dominions of the early French 
kings. In the tenth century it was acquired by the 
Emperor of Germany, and the inhabitants became 
more German than French. At the end of the Thirty 
Years' War, in 1648, Alsace became part of the dominions 
of Louis XIV. of France by right of conquest, and 



10 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

remained French until 1870, when it was ceded to 
Germany as part of the terms of peace. To whom, 
then, does Alsace belong ? The inhabitants are 
largely of German speech and origin. The conquest 
by Louis XIV. was as bitterly resented up to the time 
of the French Revolution as the German rule was 
resented immediately before the present war. Alsace 
is, in fact, one of the great problems of Europe. To 
give it back to France would not settle the dispute, 
since, owing to German immigration, there are perhaps 
more pro-Germans than pro-French in Alsace to-day. 
Simply to transfer the province from one government 
to the other would be merely to transfer the weight to 
the other scale. We must postpone a fuller discussion 
of the general problem of the " ownership " of territory 
to the second part of our study. Here we can only 
note that the one solution which gives any promise of 
finality would be to create another little self-governing 
community from the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. 
There would then be a belt of neutral States stretching 
from the Italian frontier to the North Sea — Switzer- 
land, Alsace-Lorraine, Luxemburg, Belgium, Holland. 

German Fears. 

To return to our consideration of the fear that made 
this war. It must be admitted that, whatever the 
rights and wrongs of the Alsatian question, the 
Germans might reasonably fear that their western 
neighbours would avail themselves of any menace 
from Russia to seek that revenge which they have 
nursed for over forty years ; and when we remember 
that there was an alliance between France and Russia, 
backed by a strong friendship with Great Britain, we 
can see that it was not difficult for German militarists 
to play upon the fears of the German people. It must 
be remembered that before the unification of the 
German Empire, the German States and people had 
frequently suffered greatly from the interference of 



—AND THE PEACE 11 

their neighbours, and the Government were able to 
appeal to the memory of these injuries when they 
wanted to increase their military strength. It was 
indeed the memory of the troubles which weakness and 
disunion had brought upon them that induced the 
other German States to put themselves under the 
leadership of the great military power of Prussia, as 
the one safeguard against foreign aggression. 

France and Her Colonies. 

The fears of the French people were based mainly 
on the extravagant writings of the advocates of Pan- 
Germanism, which threatened war with France for the 
purpose of annexing not so much French territory in 
Europe as French colonial territory. Since the war 
of 1870 the French colonies have been greatly extended, 
and the Pan-Germanists have strongly resented this 
expansion, especially as the colonial trade policy of 
France has not favoured the " open door," and has 
been less generous to other Powers than that of Germany 
or Britain. The Morocco incidents of 1908 and 1911 
had left a very bitter feeling behind, both in France 
and Germany. Moreover, the French believe that 
their rapid recovery from the war of 1870-71 has been 
a disappointment to Germany and that the latter 
Power cherished the dream of completing the work by 
another war. As the population of France is stationary 
and that of Germany is very rapidly increasing, the 
French were afraid of being outnumbered and sought 
to redress this disadvantage by their alliance with 
Russia and the entente with Great Britain. 

The Expansion of German Power. 

It must also be remembered that in the atmosphere 
of suspicion which has brooded over Europe during the 
last hundred years, the very fact that Germany has 
grown from a collection of feeble little States into a 
great, united Empire has given cause for uneasiness 



12 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

among her neighbours. In 1808, when Prussia was 
completely crushed by Napoleon, there was little or 
no trace of unity or organisation among the German- 
speaking peoples. The shock of defeat, however, 
appears to have put a fresh spirit into German life and 
thought. Within seven years of the battle of Jena 
Prussia was sufficiently powerful to lead a successful 
combination of forces against Napoleon himself, and 
since that time Germany has grown steadily and 
rapidly in unity and strength, until she has reached a 
point at which she ventures to issue a challenge to the 
world. Out of the attempt to destroy Prussia by force 
of arms has grown a German Empire based on military 
power. Militarism as the foundation of a State is 
insecure. In time of peace any State so built is in 
danger of collapsing; but militarism cannot be de- 
stroyed by force from without, and the German Empire, 
which has grown up out of the defeat of Jena, is now 
threatening civilisation because her rulers have always 
been able to convince their subjects that they were 
menaced by powerful enemies. 

The Menace of Pan-Germanism. 

Our own fears of Germany are a little more difficult 
to state simply. It was feared that a defeated France 
might leave the way open to German aggression 
against us, and that, if she were not checked, Germany, 
by annexing Holland and Belgium, could make herself 
such a great Power that she would threaten us at sea 
and one day seize our colonies and break up our Empire. 
There were many people who believed that the creation 
of the German navy was directed against this country ; 
and they considered that the domination of German 
foreign policy by Prussia, which has always been an 
aggressive power, and the traditions of Bismarckian 
diplomacy rendered the intentions of the German 
Government suspect. It was also believed that the 
German desire for colonies and spheres of influence 



—AND THE PEACE 13 

oversea would lead her into conflict with Great Britain, 
and unhappily these possible causes of friction had 
not been removed by an agreement between the two 
Powers similar to that which put an end to the friction 
between France and Britain. The Germans have 
always told us that their great fleet was only intended to 
protect their own commerce, but many people in Britain, 
perhaps the majority, thought that Germany's desire 
to make herself a great Naval, as well as a great Military 
Power was inspired by a wish to challenge our naval 
position, which we held to be a vital interest on account 
of our insular position and great maritime trade. 

Some idea of Pan-Germanism, the propaganda 
which is so largely responsible for the fear of Germany 
in France and Britain, can be obtained from General 
von Bernhardi's book, Germany and the Next War, 
though the influence of this book on German thought 
before the war has been greatly exaggerated. Germany 
and England, by the late Professor Cramb, also gives 
a sympathetic account of the worst type of Prussian 
philosophy. 

What had Russia to fear ? 

We have now seen to some extent why Austria and 
Germany feared Russia, France, and Britain, and why 
they were themselves feared by France and ourselves. 
We may now ask whether Russia, or the Russian 
people, was also influenced by fear. The cause for 
Russia's fear is not so plain. Her vast territory is 
truly impregnable to serious invasion, and beyond the 
actual and immediate evils of war itself she has little 
to lose even by defeat. Moreover, she is so little 
dependent on foreign trade, and so small a proportion 
of her population is engaged in industry, that the ordin- 
ary life of the country is not greatly affected even by a 
great war. Nevertheless Russia was to a large extent 
influenced by fear : the fear that Slav States like Servia 
would be dominated by non-Slavonic Powers — that is to 
say, by Austria or Germany. Although the Russian 



14 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Government is autocratic and many Russians are 
strongly opposed to its methods, there is a very strong 
national feeling — and it is probable that the nation is 
really behind the Government in the desire that 
Russia should act as leader and protector of the Slav 
peoples, whom they believe to have a great future — 
which has been retarded by the jealousy of the Western 
Powers. 

The Artificial Austrian Empire. 

The peculiar nature of the Austrian Empire justified 
to some extent the fear and suspicion with which it 
was regarded by neighbouring peoples. This Empire — 
two distinct Sovereign States, Austria and Hungary- 
comprises altogether five kingdoms and nine or ten 
smaller groups, duchies, principalities, etc., which 
have been gradually absorbed either by Austria itself 
or by Hungary. People of thirteen different nation- 
alities, speaking five or six different languages, 
inhabit these territories, and practically the only link 
between them is that they are all under the rule of the 
Hapsburg family — the old reigning House of Austria. 
The Archduchy of Austria, which was the original 
Hapsburg possession, is almost purely German ; but 
the other parts of the Empire, which have been acquired 
either by marriage or by conquest, are inhabited by 
very mixed peoples. Hungary, for instance, which 
came under the Austrian rule by the marriage of a 
Hapsburg with the heir to the Hungarian throne, con- 
tains a population of which 51 per cent, are Magyars, 
12 per cent. Germans, 12 per cent. Slovaks, 16 per cent. 
Rumanians and the rest Croats, Serbs, and other 
races. Similarly, in Galicia 53 per cent, of the popu- 
lation are Poles and 43 per cent. Ruthens, and these two 
peoples are in violent antagonism. 

The problems connected with Austria are all due 
to these race antagonisms and the attempt to group 
these various peoples under a single sovereign. On 
the eastern frontier an attempt was made to strengthen 



—AND THE PEACE 15 

the Empire in 1907 by annexing the States of Bosnia 
and Herzegovina, in violation of a solemn international 
treaty — an act which probably hastened the break-up 
of the Empire by infuriating the Serbs and increasing 
the hostility of Russia. Among the other Austrian 
problems which must be studied in connection with 
the war is the question of Trieste. This town is 
the principal port of Austria, but it is inhabited almost 
entirely by Italians, who would naturally prefer to 
be governed by their own countrymen. There are also 
a great number of Italians in the Trent district, and 
Italians consider that these districts should have been 
given to Italy at the same time as Venice, which was 
an Austrian possession till 1866, and very tyrannically 
ruled by them. 

It is only fair to say that Austria has made great 
efforts to render her subject races in Austria proper 
contented, by giving them good government and home 
rule in local affairs ; but this policy has been hampered 
by the Hungarians, who have behaved very badly to the 
Slav peoples under their rule and have opposed every 
project of federal autonomy and equal treatment for 
all the nations of the Empire. It is the inclusion in 
the Austrian Empire of a great number of Slavs which 
has made her jealous of the growth in power of the 
Slav nations in the Balkans. Her policy has always 
been to weaken these peoples and to sow dissensions 
among them. This policy has brought her into con- 
flict with Russia and has greatly embittered the 
Serbians, who are of the same race as the inhabitants 
of some of the provinces of Austria-Hungary. Hence 
the desire among many of these latter people for union 
with Serbia and the constant friction between the 
Austrian and Serbian Governments, 

Poland. 

Another difficult problem is presented by the old 
kingdom of Poland, which was broken up and divided 



16 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1795. Strong 
national feeling has been retained by the Poles during 
the hundred years which have passed, and high hopes 
have been raised that in the settlement after this war 
their kingdom will be recreated. Three generous 
manifestos were issued after the outbreak of war by 
the Emperors of Russia, Austria, and Germany, each 
promising a wide measure of self-government to the 
Poles. How far these promises will be fulfilled 
remains to be seen, but it is only fair to state that the 
Austrian section of Poland has hitherto proved the 
most contented and leniently governed. The Austrian 
Poles did in fact rally to the support of Austria ; while 
the Russian Poles, on the other hand, have asserted 
their belief in Russia's good faith in promising Polish 
reunion. 

Other outstanding difficulties and disputes in the 
European situation can only be briefly indicated here, 
but should be carefully studied by those who seek to 
understand the meaning of the war and the questions 
which must be taken into account in the terms of 
peace. 

The Neutrality of Belgium was guaranteed in 1831 
and again in 1839 by Great Britain, Austria, France, 
Prussia, and Russia. In 1870, when France and 
Prussia were at war, Great Britain intimated that, if 
Belgian neutrality was violated, by either Power, she 
would join with the other to defend it. This guarantee 
was broken by Germany in 1914, and that act was the 
immediate cause of Great Britain's declaration of war 
on Germany. The reason why Germany acted in this 
way was that France had made her frontier against 
Germany so strong that German strategists considered 
their only chance of beating France, before the Russians 
could make themselves felt, to be an invasion through 
Belgium. 

The mouth of the Scheldt, the river upon which 
Antwerp is situated, is in Dutch territory. Hence 



—AND THE PEACE 17 

even the possession of Antwerp makes it useless as a 
naval base unless Dutch neutrality is violated. The 
alleged designs of Germany on Holland are accounted 
for by the fact that the mouths of the Rhine and the 
Scheldt are both Dutch ; their possession by Germany 
would give her good naval bases very near the British 
coast, and would also allow her to make any com- 
mercial restrictions on the rivers which she thought 
useful. Britain has always very much disliked the 
idea of Antwerp passing into the hands of a hostile 
Power, and it was largely this consideration whidh 
brought about the guarantee of Belgian neutrality. 

The Schleswig-Holstein Grand Duchies were under 
the King of Denmark till 1863, when Prussia, under 
the direction of Bismarck, went to war, with the help 
of Austria, against Denmark. In 1866, after the war 
between Prussia and Austria, Schleswig-Holstein was 
annexed to Prussia. There was a great deal of diplo- 
matic cheating connected with the annexation, and 
great ill-feeling was aroused. The outstanding fact 
for us, however, is that Holstein is almost entirely 
inhabited by Germans, while Schleswig contains 
184,000 Danes, who are practically all collected in the 
northern part, near the Danish frontier. 

A War of Fear. 

With mutual fear working in the minds of the 
peoples of Europe, it is easy to see that this war has 
been in large part caused by the preparation which 
each country has made to protect itself against the 
others. France allied herself with Russia to protect 
herself against Germany, and by that alliance was 
dragged into a war in which she was not directly 
threatened. German statesmen persuaded the German 
people that they needed a fleet to protect their trade, 
and the building of that fleet roused our fear of German 
aggression, and made our policy somewhat definitely 



18 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

pro-French and anti-German. For mutual protection 
Germany and Austria formed an alliance the conse- 
quence of which was that a quarrel between Russia 
and Austria involved both allies in war against Britain, 
France, and Belgium as well as Russia. 

The war is therefore, as writers have said, a war of 
fear — the fear of the aggression of the other party : 
French and British fear of Pan- Germanism, German 
fear of Pan-Slavism. 

But, you may ask, why should either group want to 
be " top dog," predominant in Europe ? Would 
Germans, as a whole, be any better off if the Pan- 
German dreams were realised ? 

We come here to a fundamental problem which can 
only be answered by a study of the general problem of 
war and its motives, which is the subject of the Second 
Part of our Study. 

Books. 

With regard to books on the subjects dealt with in 
Part I. of our Study, it is difficult to keep the list 
within reasonable limits. 

A great many of the official documents issued by the 
various Governments concerned in the negotiations 
immediately preceding the war are collected together 
in The Diplomatic History of the War, by M. P. 
Price. 

The British Government's penny Blue-Book is also 
valuable, and the French Yellow Book contains some 
documents which do not appear in either of the other 
collections. 

The last two volumes of The Cambridge Modern His- 
tory — The Growth of Nationalities and The Latest Age — 
contain many chapters of interest. A good historical 
atlas is most necessary to an understanding of the 
problems of race and nationality in Eastern Europe. 
Ramsay Muir's Atlas of Modern History may be sug- 
gested to students. 



—AND THE PEACE 19 

The following books are also recommended : 

Austria-Hungary. 
Racial Problems in Hungary, Scotus Viator. 
The Hapsburg Monarchy, Wickham Steed. 

Russia. 

Russia (2 vols.), D. M. Wallace. 
Modern Russia, G. Alexinsky. 
A Year in Russia, M. Baring. 

The Balkans. 

Turkey and the Balkans (People's Library). 

Macedonia, H. N. Brailsford. 

The Balkans Revisited, Foster Fraser. 

Germany. 

Bismarck (Heroes of the Nations), Headlam. 
Germany (Home University Library), C. Tower. 
Pan-Germanism, Usher. 
Germany and the Next War, Bernhardi. 

Poland. 
Poland, the Knight among Nations, Van Norman. 

General. 

The Hague Peace Convention, Higgins. 
The National Principle and the War (Oxford Pam- 
phlet), Ramsay Muir. 

Modern Europe, Emil Reich. 

QUESTIONS ON PART I. 

1. Who are the Slavs ? Had Austria or Germany reason 
to fear them ? 

2. What is Pan- Germanism ? What reason had (a) 
Russia, (b) France, (c) Britain, to fear the Pan-German 
movement ? 

3. Could the war have been prevented by either Austria, 
Servia, Russia, Germany, France, or Britain ? If so, how ? 

4. Give a brief sketch of the history of Alsace. To whom 
does the province rightly belong ? 



20 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

PART II. 

THE ROOT CAUSES OF WAR. 

Summary. 

WHEN we come to examine the deep under- 
lying causes of war it will be found — as I 
think I can show — that these are due not so 
much to any lack of good-will or good intentions on 
the part of mankind as a whole, as to a number of 
very widespread mistakes and mental confusions 
which are to be found to some extent among the 
people of every country of Europe, though in an 
especial degree among the ruling classes of modern 
Prussia. The study of these mental confusions can 
be dealt with most clearly by dividing them into three 
different sections, which will be dealt with in the 
following pages, and which may be briefly summarised 
as follows : 

1. Those arising out of a crudely fatalistic view of 
politics : the assumption that it is no use trying to correct 
false ideas, because men are not responsible for their ideas 
and because their " fighting instincts " render war " inevit- 
able " ; or that man's conduct is not influenced by his ideas 
since he is not guided by " logic " ; that war is not, like law 
or churches, or any other human institution, the result of 
human effort and opinion, good and bad, but is imposed by 
outside forces which men cannot control. 

2. Those due to what has been called the One-sided 
Aberration — i.e., the failure to realise that in all matters 
connected with the relations between men the action of one 
party makes only half the operation, and that we must 
necessarily misunderstand the operation as a whole unless 
we think of the acts of the two parties together, as that 
defence necessarily implies attack, sale purchase, inferior 
superior ; that to annex a province and its inhabitants is 



—AND THE PEACE 2X 

not to annex wealth, since the inhabitants own the wealth ; 
the tendency to consider a problem of two parties — war — 
in terms of one, as when we are told that the way for a 
nation to be sure of peace is to be stronger than its enemy, 
an " axiom " which, stated in the terms of the two parties, 
amounts to saying that for two nations to keep the peace 
each must be stronger than the other. 

3. Those arising out of misconceptions as to the nature of 
government and the place of political authority in the 
modern world, as that one country can " own " another — 
as when we talk of England owning Canada, or a country 
owning the source of its raw material, although Englishmen 
would no more own the cotton fields of Louisiana by annex- 
ing that State than they now own the wheat fields of 
Canada ; or when we assume nations to be trading cor- 
porations, or economic or intellectual units that can be 
controlled or " removed " by the military power of other 
similar units. 

It may be shown, I think, that nearly all the mis- 
takes, the bad arguments, and the confused reasoning 
that cause war among civilised people can be fitted in 
to one or other of these three broad sections ; and that 
if we can possibly get men to think clearly and simply 
on these points, the danger of future wars will have 
disappeared, and the peace which ends this war will be 
a lasting peace. 



22 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 



CHAPTER I. 

The Relation of Ideas to Social and Political 
Conduct. 

Not only to Learn but to Teach. 

Our problem is not merely to know this subject, 
but to know it in such a way that we are able to make 
plain to others as well as to ourselves where current 
ideas are wrong ; not merely to know the truth about 
international relations, but to know why that truth 
has not been recognised. This involves not merely a 
knowledge of certain definite facts in economics and 
politics and history, but a knowledge of how men's 
minds work on this problem : why they have been led 
astray, in what manner they can be corrected. 

The method of study here outlined has kept per- 
manently in the foreground this consideration : that 
to get at the truth does not suffice. That is one part 
of the object. What is for us an equally important 
part is to get at it in such a way that we shall be able 
to bring it home to our fellow-men. Unless we can do 
that, all our labours and learning will be sterile so far 
as practical human affairs are concerned. 

Moreover, the question of the extent to which men 
are capable of realising great social and political 
truths, and being guided by that realisation, is part of 
the problem of war itself — it is not a question which 
concerns us only when we come to persuade others of 
the truth of our opinions. All parties to the discussion 
admit that if all men were perfectly wise, there would 
be no war ; that if men realised their best interests, 
they would not go to war. At the base of the whole 
problem of war, therefore, rests the question : Can 
men be brought to see their best interests and to be 
guided thereby ? And after the question of possi- 



—AND THE PEACE 23 

bility comes the question of means, of method. If we 
can do it, how can we do it ? Since war exists because 
men had and have false ideas, how can these false 
ideas be corrected ? And, of course, the first useful 
question in tackling that problem is this : How have 
the false ideas grown up ? Why have men not 
realised their real interests in this matter in the past ? 
How is it that human wisdom has so miserably failed, 
and that men's minds have been twisted and their 
mental vision blinded ? 

Now, curiously enough, though this problem of 
psychology — a problem of the working of the mind in 
its largest sense, of the process by which false ideas 
are born, by which they are corrected — is an important 
part of the problem of war itself, it is generally lightly 
dismissed by those who deal with the subject. 

How Our Minds Work. 
Any ordinary conversation on a subject of some 
complexity will reveal the difficulty of getting at the 
real basis of a particular opinion. It is a common 
experience that most arguments on any subject begin 
not at the real point of difference between the two 
parties at all, but at some point a long way therefrom, 
and it is only when one or the other has been pushed 
back bit by bit and is finally entrenched that it is 
realised what this underlying difference is. And, 
generally, the argument is sterile until that underlying 
point is reached. Even when a combatant does not 
see clearly himself what the real point of his own case 
is, he has nevertheless generally a strong instinctive 
sense of the strength of his reserves, until their weak- 
ness has been exposed. He will not yield until he 
realises the weakness of those reserves. One of the 
first objects, therefore, of a debater who means 
business should be to come at once to these funda- 
mental reserves hovering vaguely somewhere in the 
recesses of his opponent's mind, engage them, and 



24 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

show their weakness. It would save a lot of battles 
and of useless fighting if the abler and stronger of the 
two combatants could at the start point out to the 
other that these final reserves upon which that other 
is in reality depending are, as a matter of fact, of no 
avail. Perhaps that is not the most useful illustration. 
Put it this way : in testing the strength of any structure 
begin with the foundations. If they are shaky, it 
does not matter how strong the upper stories may be. 
If you begin with the upper stories and leave out the 
foundations, all your tests and demonstrations may be 
useless, and an infinite labour of inspection and 
examination may have been wasted. The whole 
might have been saved by beginning at the bottom. 

A Basis of Agreement. 

Now the foundations of our problem have been 
already indicated. Can men be brought to see their 
best interest and be guided by wisdom and reason ? 
That is the main question. 

Very rarely does either party to our discussion 
realise what that question involves, nor how essential 
it is that for any useful discussion we should realise its 
relation to the whole problem. 

To raise it at the beginning enables us to start from 
a point of agreement. As I have said, all parties are 
agreed that if men were perfectly good and moral and 
wise, there would be no war. If no nation robbed or 
wronged or angered another, and men were too tender- 
hearted to take pleasure in the excitement of killing, 
obviously there would be no war. At the back of 
every militarist mind there is the impression that to 
work out the principles of peace we must imagine an 
unreal man — a man that does not and cannot exist on 
this earth. Though the militarists may agree that 
war may properly be deemed " the failure of human 
wisdom," as Bonar Law called it, as much could be 
said of the law courts or the policemen, since if men 



—AND THE PEACE 25 

were perfectly wise and good neither would exist. 
And what the militarists — all of them — have in mind 
is that, as human wisdom will always in some measure 
fail, war will always go on. And the absence of war 
in some circumstances might conceivably mean an 
absence of righteousness, just as the absence of the 
law courts and policemen might — and generally does — 
imply an absence of civilisation ; although if men were 
angels, neither would exist. 

The Mistake Which Causes War. 

This, then, is the all-important question : " Can 
the wisdom of men as a whole be so far strengthened 
as not merely to enable them to realise abstractly the 
folly of war and to devise means of avoiding it, but to 
use those means and be guided by this wisdom, and 
not by their passions and impatience ? " 

That man has fighting instincts and always will 
have them, that he does not act on " reason " nor be 
guided by " logic," that wars are the result of forces 
beyond the control of the makers of theories, is a 
position which the average man regards as so im- 
pregnable that the great majority hardly think it 
worth while to defend any other, and with a superior 
smile deem it sufficient to give us a glimpse of this 
majestic fortress and then invite us to amuse ourselves 
with the futile battles outside it. 

And so far his instinct is correct. Not only is the 
question I have put to you an important question in 
deciding our attitude to life and politics, not only is 
it the question which must be answered if we are to 
make any progress in this discussion at all, but it 
represents practically, as well as philosophically, the 
most important phase of the whole problem. I 
suppose I have answered as many questions from the 
general public as any man who has had to deal with a 
discussion of this subject (our public lectures have 
been mainly a matter of answering questions), and I 



26 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

do not hesitate to say this : that if our notions on this 
point were less hazy and defective than they are, and 
if one other mental confusion (which I shall touch upon 
in the next chapter) were cleared up, all other diffi- 
culties whatsoever would disappear. If in these two 
matters — one upon which I have just touched and 
that upon which I shall touch directly — the bulk of 
men could think straight, we could dispense, in the 
problems of war and peace, with any special knowledge 
of economics or history. Just those things which are 
of common knowledge, without the help of special 
book-learning, would amply suffice to render European 
society as secure from political wars as it is happily 
now secure from religious wars or from a massacre of 
St. Bartholomew. 

Let us return, then, to the question which I have 
already put before you : " Can the wisdom of men as 
a whole be so far strengthened as not merely to enable 
them to realise abstractly the folly of war and to 
devise means of avoiding it, but to use those means 
and be guided by this wisdom, and not by their 
passions and impatience ? " 

The Militarist Answer. 

In answer to this question the militarists say : 
" Men do not act from reason, from an intelligent 
realisation of their interest, but from temper, passion, 
their fighting instinct, blindly." 

Well, suppose that were absolutely and fatally 
true, and men were " bloodthirsty, savage creatures," 
as the editor of the Spectator says, fighting from the 
lust of destruction, what would be the conclusion to 
be drawn from it ? The conclusion, say the militarists, 
is that you should give them as many destructive arms 
as possible, so that their capacity for damage while in 
their condition of blind rage should be as great as 
possible. 

Is that the right conclusion ? Or is not the con- 



—AND THE PEACE 27 

elusion rather that, if man is really that kind of animal, 
it is the duty of all of us to keep destructive weapons 
out of the hands of such an irresponsible creature, 
and to use such lucid intervals as he may have to 
persuade him to drop them ? 

If to that someone replies that the conclusion is not 
that all parties should be highly armed, but only 
ourselves, he is, of course, assuming that the British 
alone are a reasoning people. This is an instance of 
that failure in reasoning dealt with in the next section. 

Fatalism and War. 

So much for the bearing of that proposition on the 
question of armaments. But if you apply the same 
test to the same proposition in reference to another 
conclusion drawn from it by the militarists, you will 
get still more notable results. 

Some people say : Men don't act from reason or 
logic ; wars are in the nature of men ; all your theo- 
rising is " talk." At the crucial moments men are 
swept off their feet by forces which they cannot control. 

Again, suppose that were absolutely and completely 
true, what is the conclusion to be drawn ? 

Well, it is evident that if that were absolutely and 
completely true, all learning, all accumulated know- 
ledge, all books and churches, codes, Ten Command- 
ments, laws, would have no effect on human affairs, 
and that in so far as their practical work is concerned 
they might just as well be swept away. 

As a matter of fact, among great masses of men 
— in the Eastern world — pure fatalism is predomi- 
nant. "Kismet, it is the will of Allah." It is an 
attitude of mind associated either as a cause or an 
effect — for the moment it doesn't matter much which 
— with the crudest forms of Oriental stagnation ; it 
marks those who, at least as far as this world is con- 
cerned, have no hope. It is, indeed, a statement of 
the proposition that it does not matter how a man 



28 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

uses his mind or moral effort, since his conduct is 
determined by impulses and forces that are stronger 
than his own will, whatever moral or intellectual effort 
he may make. 

Now, this has only to be pointed out to be evident. 
It is certain, therefore, that the proposition in the 
crude form in which I have expressed it — the form in 
which it is most generally made — cannot be absolutely 
and completely true. 

Is Reasoning Useless ? 

You will note this, therefore, that the militarist has 
not asked himself in any clear and fresh and real way 
what his own proposition means, what even the 
immediate and necessary consequence of it must be. 
Otherwise he would not believe in it. To say that 
reasoning and the effort to know the truth do not 
affect human conduct is to condemn all those activities 
which mark the man from the beast. To say that 
man is always in danger of losing his head and of 
acting in opposition to his own best interests is not 
an argument for furnishing him with the instruments 
of destruction. 

It is essential in any discussion to realise, and have 
your opponent realise, how much of his case is involved 
in his proposition. In order to do that one may 
outline and support a counter-proposition ; then see 
how near one can get to reconciliation. And the 
counter-proposition which I think one could fairly 
set up against the fatalistic doctrine which we have 
been discussing might be outlined somewhat as follows : 
Human wisdom is a very frail thing indeed ; yet, 
however we achieve it, whether by instinct, intuition, 
" putting two and two together," or what you will, it 
is the ultimate foundation of human society. Its 
very frailty, therefore, is an argument for all that may 
tend to strengthen it and against anything which may 
tend to weaken it. 



—AND THE PEACE 29 

The Fatalist View Restated. 

But if by chance the militarist has examined with 
any effectiveness the consequences of his proposition 
as to the futility of human reason and the helplessness 
of man, he will have arrived at a conclusion somewhat 
of this kind : 

" War is the last resort in a collision of two rights. 
That is to say, two parties believe that each has right 
on his own side and will not yield to the other ; when 
this is the case, and when the questions involved are 
important enough, there is no outcome but force, and 
we can accept that fact because victory will in the 
long run go to the party which has the greater earnest- 
ness, the greater spiritual passion, the greater cohesion, 
and so forth. Man's instinct is in all crises a surer 
and better guide than argumentation. The deeper 
truths, which we know to be true, but which we are 
quite incapable of defending by argument, are those 
things which we know by instinct. As a matter of 
simple fact, time and again in history you have two 
parties both of whom are pushed by all their instincts 
to settle their differences by resort to the sword. 
And the outcome has been as true and as just as any 
that could have been devised by a court of lawyers 
or arbitrators, judging by dry law and the argumen- 
tation of legal advocates." 

The Trial by Ordeal. 
Now, however this statement of the case for war may 
disguise it, it is nevertheless a plea for the superiority 
of physical force to the force of the mind, of the material 
thing to the thing of right or conscience. It is merely 
the statement in less crude terms of Napoleon's saying, 
" Providence is on the side of the biggest bat- 
talions." Or it is the whole of the philosophy which 
stood behind the trial by ordeal. One may find among 
the reasons urged by old defenders of " trial by ordeal " 
pleas far more eloquent from this point of view, and 



30 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

far more persuasive than any of those made in our day 
on behalf of collective warfare. The old lawyer urged 
with great sincerity that God would not permit the arm 
of the innocent man to be scalded when boiling oil or 
boiling water was poured over it or when it was plunged 
into a cauldron. Still less would God permit, when 
accused and accuser met upon the field, that the inno- 
cent should be slain and the guilty should escape. But 
to-day if you deny the justice of this argument in the 
case of the individual, why should we suppose that it 
would be any truer in the case of nations ? We have 
recognised that a mere conflict of physical strength in 
the case of individuals does not establish the rights or 
wrongs of the case. It establishes nothing except 
which of the two is the stronger, or, in the case of the 
ordeal by boiling oil, which has the thicker skin. And 
just as in the establishment of justice and right between 
two different people we cannot escape the need for 
understanding, so we cannot escape the need for 
understanding in the establishment of right and 
justice between groups of men. 

I have, in the introduction to The Foundations o f 
International Polity, attempted to show that the appeal 
to force is an effort to escape the responsibility and 
labour of thinking the thing out, as was the case with 
the " ordeal." If the judges had any strong feeling of 
the clear justice of the case, any strong feeling that 
one of the parties had been outrageously ill-treated, 
their consciences would have revolted at the idea of 
submitting the issue to the " ordeal of battle." But 
when the ideas of law and justice and obligation are 
obscure and ill-defined, so that judgment is difficult, the 
judges naturally desire to escape the labour and respon- 
sibility of thinking the thing out and to submit the 
matter to the outcome of mere physical conflict, and the 
outcome of physical conflict, the arbitrament of the 
sword, is at the end only an accident as far as the moral 
issues are concerned, dependent on the amount of force 



—AND THE PEACE 31 

or the sharpness of the sword, not on principles of 
justice or wisdom. Indeed, it is only where the issues 
are not clear that anyone thinks of appealing to force, 
or rather of appealing to the superiority of the judgment 
of warfare as against the judgment or conscience of 
mankind. Perhaps the whole case against the appeal 
to force rather than the appeal to reason, on behalf of 
justice, can be summarised by saying that justice will 
not be secured by laziness in thinking and that the 
labour of the mind, not the labour of the body or the 
risk of the body, is necessary to secure the triumph of 
right. 

Muscle versus Brains. 

Those who defend war on " moral " grounds do not 
see plainly that this view of the superiority of physical 
force to intellectual force as a means of settling differ- 
ences is really a claim for matter as against mind, a 
claim for muscle as against brains, for the dead weight 
of material things as against the spiritual things, and a 
refusal to judge between right and wrong. It is shut- 
ting up the mind and the conscience ; it is the excuse 
for temper and impatience. A crowd gets excited or 
angry, patriotic or jingo, and this very fact is taken as 
a justification for war upon someone else. We lose 
our tempers and call it patriotism. A lynching party 
justifies itself in the same way. Indeed, warfare is 
very often only a lynching party on a great scale. 

The idea that wars are not made by men, but are 
imposed upon us like the earthquake and the storm, is 
so deepset in the mind of the militarist that he attri- 
butes the same error to the peace-man. Ninety-nine 
out of every hundred militarists will tell you that 
pacifists are people who believe that " war is impos- 
sible," and every war is taken as a triumphant exposure 
of the folly of their ideas. 

Danger of Confusion, 
There are two grave dangers of confusion at this 



32 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

point of the discussion. One is the confusion between 
the use of force and the resistance to force needed to 
maintain order, and the other is the notion that because 
reason breaks down, and because at times the very 
foundations of human society crumble, that in some 
way is a justification of the incidents which mark its 
crumbling. Let us take the last point first. 

Two persons, or two parties, or two nations do some- 
times lose their heads and do come to blows ; therefore, 
in the last resort, says the militarist, physical force is 
the only appeal. But because the parties resort to 
physical force that is not an argument for not trying to 
avoid it, and not so managing our relationship that we 
shall be as little likely as possible to resort to it. In a 
badly managed community, where even agriculture is 
not developed, one may get periods of famine where 
cannibalism is resorted to — it happened during some of 
the Irish famines, and it happens during some of the 
Russian famines now. Conceivably one might argue 
from that, that cannibalism is justifiable. Well, so it 
may be in certain circumstances, but the fact that it is 
resorted to is not an argument for so neglecting the 
tilling of the soil that it is likely to be resorted to. 
Rather is it an argument for saying : " If we do not culti- 
vate our fields we shall suffer from hunger and be com- 
pelled to eat our children ; let us, therefore, cultivate 
our fields with industry." In the same way we should 
argue with reference to the use of force : " If we neglect 
the understanding of human relationship, and the 
cultivation of the mind and character, we shall in 
periods of tension get to flying at one another's throats, 
because we shall not be able to understand the differ- 
ences which divide us. And that will lead to murder. 
Therefore, let us so understand human relationship that 
we shall not be likely to descend to that kind of thing, 
and let us, perhaps, establish some sort of machinery 
for the settlement of difficulties so that those kinds of 
abominations shall be avoided." In other words, 



—AND THE PEACE 33 

because physical force may represent the failure of 
human wisdom, and the last resort, that is no argument 
for the glorification of folly, no justification of war as 
the first resort. 

As to the other difficulty, the other confusion between 
the use of physical force and resistance to it, I can only 
refer the reader to the two passages in which I have 
attempted to make this very important distinction 
quite clear (see pages xxix and 161, The Foundations of 
International Polity). I could wish that the disparage- 
ment of reason with which I am now dealing were 
confined to militarists. But it is not. 

The Obligation to be Intelligent. 
I do not doubt that the insistence which I have laid 
upon the fact that mere good intention will not put an 
end to war has irritated very many whom I highly 
esteem. But if the reader has followed me so far he 
will realise that this glorification of intention which 
comes of an inner impulse and is not a matter of close 
reasoning and clear thinking is also part of the tendency 
to shirk the labour of the mind. It implies a belief that 
while men must labour with their bodies, while that is 
the primitive curse imposed upon all mankind, they need 
not labour with their minds. That, while it is a moral 
duty not to be idle in body, there is no moral duty not 
to be idle in mind ; in a word, that there is no moral 
obligation to be intelligent and to know our jobs. Now, 
not merely do outstanding facts of history show pretty 
clearly the failure of mere good intention — the associa- 
tion of a desperately low standard of civilisation like 
that of the early Christian centuries in Europe, or in 
certain of the Eastern countries to-day, with a great 
readiness for self-sacrifice, marked by the hermit and 
the anchorite of early Christian times, by a self -torturing 
fakir in the modern Orient — not merely do we see 
the most frightful cruelties inflicted by men of the 
very best intentions on themselves and on others, as 

o 



34 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

evidenced by the torturings of the Inquisition, but this 
notion that any improvement of intention will abolish 
war implies that the mass of mankind who accept war 
are morally inferior to those who oppose it. I do not 
believe that, but let us suppose it is true. Here are 
two instincts : the instinct of the jingo who, hearing of 
outrages upon his countrymen in the Transvaal or else- 
where, clamours for war ; the instinct of the pacifist 
who feels that war would be the greater evil of the two. 
How are we to show to the other man that our instinct 
is right and his is wrong, save by a mental process of 
comparison and analysis of facts, etc. ? I remember in 
this connection, by the way, lecturing once in a German 
University, and during the discussion which followed 
my lecture one sceptical German professor spoke in the 
following sense : " I am not sure that I have understood 
everything that Mr. Angell has been telling us, but I 
have strongly the intuition that he is right." And on 
the other side of the room another sceptical German 
professor shouted out : " And I have strongly the 
intuition that he is all wrong." Now what part can 
mere intuition and instinct play in the reconciliation 
of the two ? 

Instinct or Reason ? 
I sometimes wonder whether the philosophers so 
fashionable of late, engaged upon the glorification of 
instinct and intuition, have ever played such a game as 
tennis or golf. If they have, they must know this, that 
one's instincts and intuitions are very frequently wrong. 
In tennis you cannot get a ball over the net until you 
learn to check the instinct, a very strong one when one 
first learns, to run into the balls which you receive. It is 
the same with a dozen games that one could mention, 
one has to check impulses which are at times tremen- 
dously strong before one can do so simple a thing as 
catch a ball or understand the management of a bat or 
a golf club or a racquet. And society is a little more 
complicated than any of these things. The general 



^-AND THE PEACE 85 

relation of head to heart in such a thing as the under- 
standing of a problem like this is the occasion of infinite 
confusion. 

I have illustrated one confusion thus : 

On the other side of the street you catch a glimpse 
of a man wanted by the police for the revolting murder 
of a little girl. At once your sentiment is excited to 
an intense degree ; it blazes up in wild clamour and 
you give the hue and cry, and the crowd catch the 
man. And then you see that on his left hand he has 
five fingers : the murderer had only two. Now, 
because your mind is capable of certain purely logical 
processes — and thanks only to that — the wild current 
of your sentiment is immediately changed, and you 
are now mainly concerned to see that an innocent man 
does not suffer a threatened lynching. You are just 
as " sentimental " as before ; the engine of your heart 
is beating as vigorously, the emotional power is just 
as great but it happens (to state the thing in mechanical 
terms) to be turning the wheel of action in an opposite 
direction because certain levers, which are your 
mental perceptions, have been shifted by contact with 
certain facts. Most militarists and some pacifists 
say : " The engine alone is what matters ; provided 
only that that has plenty of power you can throw 
away your steering gear as an encumbrance, and the 
driver can shut his eyes." Well, it is because mankind 
has often been guided by that idea that history is so 
largely a record of bad accidents. 

For note this : in an age of simpler enthusiasms the 
steering gear in this case might not have worked so 
well. In an age when most men believed that any 
ordinary murderer would not hesitate to call in the 
ever-convenient witch to remedy so trifling a matter 
as a missing finger, the simple logical mechanism by 
which you recognised the man's innocence might not 
have worked ; you would have wanted to see whether 
God indicated the man's innocence by allowing his 



36 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

arm to be boiled for half an hour without injury. And 
goodness of heart, the affection of the crowd for their 
own children, their detestation of so abominable a 
crime as child murder, would have cost an innocent 
man his life and fair name. 

Why Instincts must be Guided by Reason. 

So in the problem of war. The good-hearted fellow 
who reads on his way to work that the Boers are 
" murdering girls in the Golden City " will, if his 
previous knowledge of these things is still in the 
witchcraft stage, shout with the loudest for the 
execution of " Kroojer." He would make part of 
" wildly, unreasonably sentimental " crowds. But I 
doubt if you could, when in that condition, " breathe 
into his heart the sentiment of Peace." If you urged 
his duty to his brother Boer he would want to know 
about his duty to the sister Englishwomen being 
murdered in the Golden City. 

But if previous to his hearing of these stories — if, 
during the ordinary course of his education by dis- 
cussion and reading, at times when he is not shouting 
in a crowd — he had formed certain definite notions 
which so bore on the likelihood of these things as to 
cause him to suspect the story to be either a mis- 
chievous fake or silly rubbish, he might still, it is 
true, be just as angry, but his anger would be directed, 
not against Boers, but against wicked politicians and 
lying newspapers. Again, the levers of the mind 
would not have affected the force of the emotion 
given out by the heart, they would merely have 
changed the direction of the resulting action. Without 
the chauffeur on the car — who is in this case the mind — 
the energy generated in the engine is just one of the 
blind forces of Nature ; never wholly beautiful while 
blind (we may deem the instinct of motherhood, for 
instance, wholly beautiful, yet it may lead a tiger to 
tear a living child in pieces to feed its cubs), but 



—AND THE PEACE 37 

worthy almost of worship when they take to them- 
selves the eyes of free will and intelligence. 

The whole attitude of the pacifist " intuitionalist," 
as of the militarist, assumes that ideas are not the 
children of other ideas, that opinions have not a 
father and a mother, but that, like Topsy, they " just 
growed." If we are to stop the evils which are caused 
by certain ideas we must make some inquiries as to 
their parentage. 

Are We Guided by Reason ? 

It is necessary again and again to urge that we 
no more assume that men will act rationally than we 
assume that war is impossible. Even an exceptionally 
clear-sighted and well-informed critic was once guilty 
of the confusion involved in the following remark : 
" Mr. Norman Angell is convinced that mankind is 
guided by reason." Mr. Norman Angell is convinced 
of nothing of the kind. About nineteen-twentieths of 
the time mankind seems to be guided by the negation 
of reason. I am convinced that when mankind acts 
wisely it is guided by reason. The trouble is that 
most of the time it doesn't act wisely. What I am 
convinced of is that its only hope lies in wisdom, and 
that that is the thing we must nurture and cultivate. 

I have referred elsewhere* to such well-known 
changes in the attitude of men as are connoted by the 
cessation of private and religious warfare. Men used 
to fight duels, and they have ceased or are ceasing 
to do so ; men used to believe that misfortunes were 
brought upon them by witches, and to put to frightful 
tortures the old women whom they believed to be 
guilty ; men used to take delight in the struggles and 
wounds of combats between gladiators ; witnesses and 
prisoners in courts of justice used to be tortured ; 
zealots for some other faith than that of the majority 

* The Great Illusion, Part IL, Chaps. II. and V. ; International Polity, 
pp. 50-55. 



38 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

used to be burned. What is it which has caused men 
to cease doing all these things if it is not the gradual 
increase of the knowledge of facts and the application 
of reason to those facts ? There was an eminent 
Catholic in the fifteenth century who said this : " It 
would be impossible for us Catholics to sit at table 
with a heretic, because he carries with him a certain 
odour which is personally intolerable to us." Was 
not that impression instinctive ? The odour has at 
all events disappeared in consequence of certain 
books appealing purely to reason. It is from the 
collection by whatever means of a myriad facts that 
instinct grows, and it is by the application of reason 
to those facts that instinct is corrected and made to 
contribute to man's advance. 

This Section Summarised. 

This whole section of our subject may, therefore, be 
summarised thus : The foundation of the militarist's 
case — whether avowed or not- — is the theory that 
man, by instinct and necessity, must, in things that 
matter, fight ; that this instinct, " human nature," 
will always defeat " theories." This necessarily im- 
plies that men do not and cannot control their own 
actions ; that such changes for good as distinguish 
the modern man from the man of the Stone Age, the 
Anglo-Saxon from the cannibal, are not the result 
of thought, of changing ideas, of gathered ex- 
perience, of comparison, of knowledge, of the 
organisation i hereof, of science, but that all this has 
been done for man by some outside mechanical force, 
that it is a gratuitous gift which he does not deserve 
because it is not the result of any effort on his part. 
The militarist theory also necessarily involves the 
conclusion that public opinion is something quite 
outside ourselves, and involves also, of course, a 
complete failure to realise that when we talk of public 
opinion we are public opinion ; when we talk of nations 



—AND THE PEACE 39 

being irrational, we are the nations ; so that even in 
our Church service war, pestilence and famine are 
classed together. War, like earthquake, " descends 
upon us," there being no recognition that, after all, 
while we do not make the earthquake we do make 
war. Thus, also, the persistent idea in the mind of 
the militarists that pacifists are trying to prove the 
impossibility of war ; whereas, of course, they are 
trying to prove the folly of war, and human folly is by 
no means an impossibility. We have at all times to 
shout this distinction at the top of our voices ; war 
will always go on if men are foolish enough to wage 
it.* In almost every discussion you will find your 
opponent is trying to make it appear that the dispute 
is as to the possibility or likelihood of war. Of course, 
if war were impossible we should have no earthly 
reason for worrying about the question. If war is 
likely as the result of human folly, that is one of the 
strongest arguments that exists why we should con- 
cern ourselves with preventing it by correcting human 

folly. 

Further, the belief that men cannot control their 
own conduct is a denial in varying forms of moral 
responsibility : if the forces of blind instinct will 
always overwhelm the efforts of man's intelligence, 
then not merely is it no good making moral or mental 
effort, but he cannot be blamed for being overcome 
by something stronger than himself. 

Finally, if, as many people say, men are not affected 
by reason, argument, accumulated knowledge, does 
it not follow that those things in the shape of learning, 
education, books, churches, and the rest are useless ? 
If that is not the conclusion, what is the conclusion ? 
And if we assume that men are likely to fight blindly 

* Mr. Churchill said on one occasion : " We have sometimes been assured 
by persons who profess to know that the danger of war has become an illusion." 
I know of no one who professes to know that the danger of war has become an 
illusion. It is the benefits of war which we declare to be an illusion. 



40 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

and without reason, are we to conclude from that 
that they should be rendered as destructive as possible 
by being armed as much as possible ? 

Books on this Part. 

As to the bibliography of this part of the subject, 
it is my impression that formal logic and scholastic 
philosophy is almost less than no good for our purpose. 
Although the old conflict between Determinism 
and Free Will is involved in the questions raised in 
this chapter, I believe that to tackle those problems 
after the fashion of the schoolmen would be only to 
confuse our minds, and that we should keep our feet 
on the ground by discussing those things in the terms 
of our own subject rather than in the scholastic terms. 
In formal logic one should, of course, be sure of ter- 
minology (in order to avoid it), and Jevons's little book 
is perhaps the best for that purpose. Better than the 
usual form of treatise on logic is a book like J. M. 
Robertson's Letters on Reasoning, which I can cordially 
recommend as distinctly helpful. 

On the philosophical aspect of the subject treated 
in this chapter, however, there is one book which no 
serious student should on any account fail to read, 
and that is the first half of Mill's Essay on Liberty. 
That is, in the view of the writer, one of the very few 
books that really help a man to think as distinct from 
the books that merely furnish him with facts. I 
cannot sufficiently emphasise the necessity of thoroughly 
absorbing the first half of that masterpiece (the second 
half does not so much matter). As a word of warning, 
I would say that certain literary mandarins who 
include this book in their " superior person " con- 
demnation of Victorian literature do not know what 
they are talking about. 

In the matter of historical reading on this phase of 
the question there is no one incident more worthy of 
study than the fact of the cessation of religious warfare. 



—AND THE PEACE 41 

Here is this great fact, this great change in European 
society. In the fifteenth or even in the sixteenth 
century in any part of Western Europe a man was 
exposed to the risk of persecution, death, massacre, 
and war on account of his religious beliefs. It was 
not merely a fact of politics which might pass over a 
man's private life, as does often a fact like an auto- 
cratic or monarchical form of government as distinct 
from a republican one, but it was a real and ever- 
present danger pursuing a man as it pursued the 
Huguenots and the earlier heretics, into family life, 
threatening him in mind, body, and estate with terrors 
so formidable that we in our day can hardly conceive 
them. To abolish this peril, to wipe it away, to give 
to European society security from it, was one of the 
few real steps that have been made, one of those few 
things that can be definitely marked as " progress," 
one of the few real transformations. And it came about 
within a period of two hundred years or less, and the 
factors were, as we know, first and last those of public 
opinion, those of a changed mind and a different idea 
of human relationship, and of the place that force 
should occupy in human affairs. Mere machinery, 
constitutions, treaties, played no part among the 
causes of this change ; they only followed as the result, 
followed generally a long way in the rear of changes 
that were purely intellectual and moral. 

No study is more worth while to the student of this 
subject than the details of this miracle. 

History will have nothing to say to us on this 
subject unless we conceive of it as the story of the 
development of the mind, or, if you prefer, the 
story of a world community. This idea, which began 
for practical purposes with Kant, has been steadily 
growing since his time ; and, as Bryce has put it : 
" The fact is that world history has become one 
history." 

I know of no small book which so well embodies 



42 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

this conception as The Living Past, by F. S. Marvin 
(Oxford University Press). This little work brings 
out very clearly that intellectual interdependence of 
the world which so long preceded material inter- 
dependence, which is, indeed, almost as old as written 
history itself. It shows the interaction of intellectual 
and moral forces, the role of the factor of intercom- 
munication, in which must be included not merely the 
means of travel and transport, but the communication 
of ideas through the written and spoken word. 

Our bibliography on this section of the subject 
should include the following minimum : 

1. Mill's Essay on Liberty (first half). 

2. Marvin, The Living Past. 

3. Lecky, (a) History of Rationalism, (b) History of 
European Morals. 

4. J. M. Robertson, Letters on Reasoning. 

5. Angell, introduction and first two chapters of 
Foundations of International Polity, and Chapters II., 
III., and V. of The Great Illusion, Part II., now 
reprinted in Prussianism and its Destruction. 

And if possible, the following : 

Myer's History as Past Ethics. 

Ruffini, History of Religious Liberty. 

Draper, History of the Intellectual Development of 
Europe. 

Jevons's Logic. 

It will be noted that the historical works all bear on 
the problem of the relation of ideas to social and 
political conduct, which is the first part of our subject ; 
and should be read with special reference to the 
cessation of religious war, the disappearance of the 
duel, of private war, of trial by war ; to the growth of 
law, the cessation of hostilities between groups, the 
decline of fanaticism. Read not with the idea of 
remembering disconnected facts, but to establish in 
your own mind how those things have worked out in 
theTpast. 



—AND THE PEACE 43 

QUESTIONS ON PART II., CHAP. I. 

1. "In such cases might gives the right to occupy or to 
conquer. Might is at once the supreme right, and the 
dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of 
war. War gives a biologically just decision, since its 
decisions rest on the very nature of things." 

Bernhardi : " Germany and the Next War." (Page 15). 

Do you deem therefore that the victory of the Turks over the 
Christians in the Balkan Peninsula four hundred years 
ago was a demonstration that they were the right and 
proper masters thereof? Does this law indicate that 
Louis XIV. was right in taking Alsace from Germany or 
Bismarck right in taking it back from the French ; or the 
French right in now trying to retake it from Germany ? 
Did the military might of Napoleon I. give him the right 
to the conquests that he made ? 

2. " Efforts are also often made to stir up ill-feeling 
between the other States, so as to have a free hand for private 
schemes. This is the policy on which England has built up 
her power in Europe, in order to continue her world policy 
undisturbed. She cannot be justly blamed for this ; for 
even if she has acted with complete disregard of political 
morality, she has built up a mighty Empire, which is the 
object of all policy, and has secured to the English people 
the possibility of the most ambitious careers. We must not 
deceive ourselves as to the principles of this English policy. 
We must realise to ourselves that it is guided exclusively 
by unscrupulous selfishness, that it shrinks from no means 
of accomplishing its aims, and thus shows admirable diplo- 
matic skill." 

Bernhardi : " Germany and the Next War.'''' (Page 281 .) 

What general moral as to the moral advantages of the war 
system do you draw from this ? 



44 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 



CHAPTER II. 

The Outstanding Failure of Reasoning in 
International Relationships. 

The problem of war and peace and all that relates 
thereto — the relationships of nations, the defence of 
our country, the preparation for war — are all problems 
of two or more parties ; yet they are almost invariably 
discussed as if they were problems of one. 

There is an outstanding illustration of this in a 
favourite saying of Mr. Churchill's. He laid down 
this rule : 

" The way to secure peace is to be so strong that 
victory in the event of war is certain." 

Now that is a classic instance of a problem of two 
parties being treated in terms of one. For if we apply 
the principle to the two parties here is the result that 
we get : 

If two individuals, or nations, or groups of nations, 
want to keep the peace each must be stronger than 
the other. 

Now, there is no one fault of reasoning which so 
marks the discussion of this subject as that involved in 
Mr. Churchill's rule — the fault, that is, of discussing a 
problem of two or more parties in terms of one. 

A Further Illustration. 

A characteristic illustration of the same thing was 
that contained in several of the early criticisms of 
The Great Illusion. The Times and the Spectator, to 
say nothing of the Daily Mail and other popular 
organs, said in effect this : 

44 Mr. Angell writes as though armaments were 
mainly concerned with attack or the motives leading 
thereto : whereas armaments are for defence. The 



—AND THE PEACE 45 

nations maintain their armaments for the purpose of 
defending their territories, not for the purpose of 
invading others." 

Now, if armaments are for the purpose of defence 
they are for the purpose of repelling attack, and are 
therefore pretty intimately concerned with the question 
of attack, the motives which may lead thereto, the 
advantages which may be gained thereby. The pro- 
positions of these wise critics amount to saying this : 

" The nations of Europe will shortly be engaged 
valiantly defending their homes against the armed 
hosts who resolutely refuse to attack them. This 
Armageddon will be particularly murderous and the 
battles particularly appalling because each army has 
for years been training itself to leave its neighbour 
alone. They will all defend themselves heroically to 
the last man against the attacks which nobody will 
consent to make." 

And exactly the same order of reasoning is that of 
Major Stewart-Murray, who says : 

" The peace of the world depends upon the armed 
forces of the nations." 

Which is just the same as saying, that if the nations 
had no armies the wars between them would be 
appalling. 

The Importance of this Matter. 

Now, it may strike the student that all this is of a 
simplicity so great as to be almost childish, certainly 
not to be worth one of the three broad divisions into 
which this great subject is arranged. 

But it is a commonplace of the treatment of those 
things that matter in human affairs that mistakes are 
not due to a lack of special knowledge but to the 
failure, in arriving at an opinion, to keep in mind at 
one and the same time the several elements of the 
same facts — the facts themselves being generally 
equally available to the learned and to the unlearned. 



46 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

The educated Roman or Greek who was quite scep- 
tical as to the witchcraft and augurs had no larger 
knowledge of the physical science than the sixteenth 
century judge who did believe in the supernatural 
power of witches. The difference between the two 
types of mind was in clearness of thought. 

G. K. Chesterton has talked somewhere of the 
half-witted persons who think with one lobe of their 
brain at a time instead of the two lobes at once. 
That would indicate the kind of failure of reasoning 
with which we are dealing. Defence, for instance, 
necessarily implies attack. There cannot be any 
defence unless someone attacks or intends to attack. 
War, defence and attack, like top and bottom, father 
and child, front and back, superior and inferior, sale 
and purchase, friend and enemy, are all double facts, 
as opposed to what may be called simple facts. It is 
impossible, that is to say, to conceive the whole 
without the two parts. And yet, as we have seen, 
although they are bound together, although the one 
necessarily implies the other, we do not keep the two 
elements parallel in our minds. We vision first the 
one element to the exclusion of the other, and then 
the other to the exclusion of the one. We cut a living 
fact in half and then regard each half as a living thing. 
This was borne in upon me strikingly once when in 
my younger days I encountered in argument two 
amateur economists. One argued at great length and 
in great detail on the assumption that a market was 
a place where things were bought and not sold ; the 
other argued at equal length and in equal detail on the 
assumption that a market was a place where things 
were sold and not bought. To neither did it really 
occur — and, indeed, neither was fully capable of 
understanding — that a market is necessarily a place 
where things are bought and sold, and that there 
cannot be a purchase without a sale nor a sale without 
a purchase. 



—AND THE PEACE 47 

The " One-sided Aberration.'" 

It is this failure of reasoning which Novikow called 
the " One-sided Aberration." I have attempted to 
indicate in the introduction to the Foundations of Inter- 
national Polity (pp. xxxix. and xl.) that it is this con- 
fusion in thinking which lies at the bottom of most 
failures of the social sense. The social sense, after all, 
resides in a capacity to see the mixing of the two 
parties in a social relationship, and, of course, all social 
relationships reside in the mixing of two or more 
parties. 

There is scarcely a feature of our subject in which 
confusion is not occasioned by this one-sided aberration. 
Thus we find it even in a serious, and, on the w r hole, 
fair and carefully reasoned review in the Quarterly 
Review, in a long plea for the moral utility of war. The 
author begs us to remember that but for war Greek 
culture would have gone down at Marathon before the 
attacks of the Persians. The true statement is, of 
course, that but for war the moral possessions of the 
Greeks would not have been threatened. 

In the same way Admiral Mahan said that the 
utility of armaments had been shown by the war which 
Britain fought against Napoleon and her success 
therein. She was able by virtue of her arms to carry 
on her trade in relative security, which but for her force 
she would never have been able to do. Again, but for 
war — Napoleon's war — Britain would have been even 
more secure than she was and her trade far greater 
than it was. 

Again, we are told that the unification of Germany 
was only made possible by the fact that by the strength 
of her arms Germany was able to resist the intrigues of 
Louis Napoleon, which would have prevented German 
unity. Yet, if war had been out of the question, if 
Louis Napoleon had not threatened the use of his force, 
Germany would not have had to go to war in order to 
be free to manage her internal affairs in her own way. 



48 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

By turning things upside down in this way, pacifism 
has always been represented as the enemy of national- 
ity. Whereas, of course, it is war which is the deadly 
enemy of nationality. If political groups had given up 
settling their differences by arms, as the religious 
groups have done, Finland, Poland, Alsace, Ireland, 
would no more be suffering from the oppression of 
military masters than the Protestants in France are 
now suffering from the oppression of the more powerful 
Catholics. So long as military force entered into the 
settlement of religious differences, any group was in 
danger of oppression by a more powerful one. But so 
soon as there was a realisation on both sides that mili- 
tary force should be kept out of it, then all parties 
became secure in their religious possessions. 

The Necessity for Defence. 

Which brings us to a conclusion touched upon in the 
last section, but which in part also belongs to this — 
namely, that defence, resistance, the determination to 
see that the other man's force is not used against you, is 
not, properly speaking, the adoption of a policy of force, 
but the refusal to let force control things. The pacifist 
no more urges that a nationality should submit to oppres- 
sion than he would urge that Huguenots should deny 
their faith because a more powerful party threatened it. 
The man who does not believe that military force should 
be used in the settlement of religious questions, who is 
opposed to the employment of force in those questions, 
puts the blame upon the man who uses it, not upon the 
party who resists it. We all see now that war in the 
domain of religion is monstrous. Imagine someone, 
however, arguing this way : " War in the religious 
domain bad ! War in the religious domain unjustifi- 
able ! Why, it is glorious ; it is the mother of all 
the virtues ! Just look at the Huguenots defending 
their faith ; just look at those dying at the stake rather 



—AND THE PEACE 49 

than deny their faith ; do you mean to say they should 
not have fought ? " Of course, no one means that they 
should not have fought, but we all mean that they 
should not have been compelled to fight. It is a noble 
thing to see a man go to the stake for his faith, but it is a 
vile thing that he should be compelled to do so. The 
resistance to the Inquisition was magnificent ; the fact 
of the Inquisition was an abomination. No sane man 
to-day would ask that we return to the massacres of 
Alva in the Netherlands or of Cromwell in Ireland ; 
that we should tear out the eyes of children, crush the 
feet of a man to pulp for being mistaken on some point 
of theological dogma, disembowel girls in the street in 
the name of Christ — no one wants to return to these 
things, no one pretends that these are noble things, or 
that we are not the better for having got rid of them. 
It was the resistance to these things which was noble. 
Yet if there had been no resistance there would have 
been no war. That does not make us justify war, 
because equally there would have been no war if those 
things had not been inflicted. 

Yet although this simple distinction is clear to us 
in the kind of warfare that has passed, that between 
the religious bodies, we seem quite incapable of making 
the same distinction in the case of warfare between 
political bodies. 

Our opponents praise " war " as a good thing because 
the resistance to it on the part of an oppressed people 
is noble. It would be just as sensible to praise the 
Inquisition as a good thing because the resistance 
to it implied noble qualities on the part of those who 
suffered. 

Surely the truth is that alil^e in political and re- 
ligious matters force should neither be used nor sub- 
mitted to.* As Novikow says, a man's first duty is 
not to defend his country ; his first duty is not to 

* See Foundations of International Polity, pp. xxx, xxxii. 



50 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

attack anyone else's. All our trouble comes from the 
failure in that duty. 

Why Men Praise War. 

It will be realised from the foregoing that through 
this type of misconception comes all the argument in 
favour of war as " the mother of all the virtues." The 
Ruskin view of war being valuable as developing noble 
qualities is practically never urged saved by those who 
have this fatal capacity of dealing with one half of a 
fact at a time, and forgetting the other half while so 
doing. 

The half of the fact which, for the purpose of making 
the argument, the defender of war on moral grounds 
overlooks is this : that he himself is in favour of 
peace. 

Even the most rampant Jingo clamouring for un- 
limited armaments will tell you that he wants them in 
order that the peace may not be broken. The German 
Emperor, Mr. Roosevelt, Lord Roberts, Lord Charles 
Beresford, Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Whibley, 
every mortal man who need be regarded in this dis- 
cussion, tells you that he is in favour of peace ; that he 
wants to spare his country the horrors of war. And 
every one of those I have mentioned has argued in 
favour of war (which he wants to prevent) and against 
peace (which he wants to promote). 

Some More Results of the One-sided Aberration. 

Of course this failure to see the two elements of the 
same fact at one and the same time is particularly noted 
in all those questions which arise out of the desire to 
annex territory. There is, for instance, the idea that 
when you annex a province you annex a market, over- 
looking the fact that you annex at the same time the 
people who are supplying and will continue to supply 
that market ; or that when you annex so much 



—AND THE PEACE 51 

" wealth " or property, you annex at the same time 
the people who own the wealth and the property.* 

This, perhaps, is one of the best illustrations of the 
truth that most of the errors on this subject arise first, 
from defective reasoning, and, secondly only from 
lack of knowledge. No special study, for instance, is 
necessary in order to know that an army always takes 
the best men physically of the population ; so that if a 
nation is much at war, its best men get killed off ; and 
that the same thing is taking place in the case of the 
nation with which it is fighting. And as the effect of 
victory is to incorporate the beaten — i.e., presumably 
" inferior " — people into the victors' population, the 
net effect of warfare must be the survival of the unfit 
and the steady worsening of the nation. All that was 
needed to arrive at this result was to think about it. 
Yet that even famous authors have not thought about 
it at all is proved by the fact that men have written 
learned books in defence of war as a means of the 
survival of the fit, and have not troubled to give a 
word of explanation as to the process just indicated. 
They have simply accepted carelessly current words 
about the survival of the fittest, allowed their minds 
to form false pictures on the strength of those inaccurate 
words, and on the false basis so formed have erected 
their fantastic theories. 



* There is a story which I sometimes tell at lectures, and which other 
lecturers may find useful as illustrating the truth that some luminous and out 
standing test fact will give us an indication of the value of some of the most 
abstruse theories. I was once standing watching the gambling at Monte 
Carlo, and while doing so a shabby individual came up to me and showed me 
weird and puzzling columns of figures, which he said represented an infallible 
system he had discovered, a means whereby I could break the bank and win a 
million francs. Now, I know if I had attempted to investigate those figures 
and argued with him about them I should have been lost, for they dealt, of 
course, with the laws of chance, and the laws of averages, and things about 
which philosophers will quarrel till the end of time. But there was not the 
least necessity to do that, because there was an outstanding fact which gave 
me the measure of the value of the system. Its owner wanted to sell it for 
twenty francs. As I told him, in the face of that fact I was not interested in 
his figures. 



52 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Thus, even in those cases where it may be preferable 
to call attention rather to the facts of the case than to 
the errors of the reasoning, it will be found that the 
facts themselves are visible and of common knowledge. 
One does not, for instance, need to have a detailed 
knowledge of history to realise that a readiness to 
fight is not necessarily associated with nobility of 
character. The Venezuelans and the Costa Ricans, 
always fighting, are not nobler than the Canadians or 
the Australians, who do not often fight. 

The facts dealt with in Chapters IV. and V. of the 
second part of The Great Illusion (now republished in 
Prussianism and its Destruction) are readily available 
to anyone of quite ordinary reading. 

QUESTIONS ON PART II., CHAP. II. 

1. " Nations are under no illusion as to the unprofitable- 
ness of war in itself. ... To regard the world as governed 
by self-interest only is to live in a non-existent world, an 
ideal world, a world possessed by an idea much less worthy 
than those which mankind, to do it bare justice, persistently 
entertains." 

Admiral Mahan : North American Review, March, 1912. 

What moral motives do you suppose animate a Power like, say, 
Germany in her aggression upon Belgium or France ? 

2. "As the motives of the several wars cited rose far 
above a mere financial advantage, so their results have been 
beneficial from a nobler point of view. The preservation 
of the North American Union, with the abolition of the 
degradation of mankind in slavery, and of the disastrous 
economical condition of slave labour ; the welding of the 
German race into the German nation, followed by the great 
industrial and economic advance, which only a unified 
administration could have insured ; the detachment of 
Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria from the rule of Turkey, 
the benefit to the inhabitants of those provinces, attested 
by the results and newly witnessed to in recent years by the 
miseries of Albania under continued Turkish rule ; the 
advantage to Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines from 
the substitution of American influence, or American control, 



—AND THE PEACE 53 

for that of Spain ; the opportunity of Japan and her national 
security, purchased by the successes in Manchuria at a money 
cost far exceeding in proportion that of any of the other 
wars named — all these are instances of benefits secured by 
war, and which could not have been secured by law, for 
in no one of the cases was there a law which could have 
accomplished the specific result." 

Mahan : "'Armaments and Arbitration." (Page 111.) 

" We owe to successful war, waged by a small and hardy 
nation skilled in arms, the priceless heritage of Greek cul- 
ture which would not have been ours had the Persians won 
at Marathon. We owe to successful war the fact that 
England, Holland and North Germany to-day have an out- 
look on the world quite other than would be theirs had the 
counter-reformation not been checked by force of arms. 
Where would the spirit of freedom be found in our time if 
the Armada had not been beaten, if the war in the Low 
Countries had ended in a Spanish victory, if Gustavus had 
not led his Swedes to fight and die at Leipsic ? Would it 
have been better for Europe that Valmy had not been 
fought, that the ragged legions of liberty had never been 
urged to their great counterstroke against the reactionary 
forces of the old monarchies by the glorious mad music of 
the 4 Marseillaise ' ? Would it have been better for the 
world that, when the French war for freedom became 
perverted into war for conquest, it had not been checked in 
Russia, in Spain, and on the sea at Trafalgar, and checked 
by force of arms ? If Napoleon failed to enslave Europe, 
it was only because a sufficient number of Europeans were 
prepared to die in battle to prevent him from succeeding 
in his undertaking. Such measure of success as he attained 
is to be attributed to the fact that for many years he was 
able to persuade an adequate number of Frenchmen to die 
for the ideal he stood for, while his opponents failed to 
induce an adequate number of their subjects to die for the 
polity under which they lived. The pressure of war edu- 
cated the peoples and welded the populations into nations of 
men ready to die for the preservation of their nationality ; 
and before the new national ideal France went down in 
October, 1813. In all this, where is the economic motive 
of war ? " 

Quarterly Review, July, 1912 



54 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

How far was the use of armed force the origin of the evils from 
which the above-mentioned wars gave deliverance ? 

Since it was the slave-holders who appealed first to war, the 
French who tried to prevent German unity by war, 
Turkey who conquered and held the Balkans for four 
hundred years by war, Spain who held down her colonies 
by military force, would it not be true to say that it is the 
belief of nations in war which created these evils in the 
first instance ? Do you consider that this passage fur- 
nishes an instance of a familiar form of failure in 
reasoning ? 

In what instance has armed force prevented the freeing of 
peoples from bad government ? Does history show no 
other way than war by which civilisation can be spread ? 

3. " Leaving aside all questions of political and military 
advantage, however, we will confine ourselves to consider- 
ing the purely economic gains accruing from such a victory. 
First, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, not to speak of 
the northern provinces of France which would, all told, 
represent a population of twenty millions, would pass into 
German hands. These States are, as Mr. Angell informs 
us, in a better financial position than Germany, and the 
average wealth per capita is greater than is the case with 
the individual German; thus they would represent a taxable 
value of at least thirty millions of German citizens and 
increase by fifty per cent, the taxable and financial resources 
of the German Empire. Thus the burden of taxation 
distributed over a larger and wealthier population would 
press far less heavily upon the individual German than at 
present. Mr. Angell tells us that at the present time the 
German Chancellor is at his wits' end to make both ends 
meet. Would not the acquisition of three wealthy States 
do something to simplify his problem ? Again, the northern 
seaports of France and the ports of Holland and Belgium, 
gates through which flow the largest proportion of the 
commerce of Continental Europe, would be in German 
hands and subject to German taxation ; without, there- 
fore, directly taxing a single Frenchman or Hollander or 
Swiss, Germany could secure a revenue of £50,000,000 per 
annum." 

A Rifleman : " Struggle for Bread" (Page 92.) 



—AND THE PEACE 55 

" Taking the case of a purely Franco- German war we 
shall have greatly over-estimated the total direct and 
indirect cost to a victorious Germany at £200,000,000 ; 
against this must be set off a French war indemnity of at 
least an equal amount (we have seen that a war indemnity 
can, if intelligently utilised, be made of profit to its recipient), 
and, moreover, the increased financial resources due to the 
annexations of Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and the 
northern French seaports, an all-round increase of taxation 
which may be estimated at £100,000,000 per annum. 
Surely enough to make attack worth a Government's while 
as a business proposition ! But it may be said that the 
financial disorganisation caused by the war would hit the 
small States and Europe generally, thus materially reducing 
the financial resources which it is proposed to tax. But 
the financial stability of a modern State is far less easily 
over-balanced than many people imagine. France, after 
all the sufferings of 1870, with fire and sword carried through 
her fairest provinces, within a single decade so far recovered 
herself as to be in a far superior financial position to the 
very Power which had conquered her ; with the shorter 
duration, therefore, of a modern war, the economic reactions, 
if more conspicuous, must be in reality far less than was 
the case formerly. There might, and probably would be, 
a temporary depression all round, a run on credit, etc., but 
this depression would be merely temporary." 

A Rifleman : " Struggle for Bread''' (Page 95.) 

" Again, consider the case of a Russo- German war. That 
Germany could gain anything material from such a struggle 
may be dismissed as unlikely ; it was for this reason that 
Bismarck advised friendship with ' our eastern neighbour,' 
but does the same thing apply to a victorious Russia ? 
Would the occupation of Hamburg or Bremen be of no 
advantage to the Russian Empire ? Or in the case of an 
Austro-Russian war, would not an Austrian triumph mean 
ultimately the possession of Salonika and control over the 
greater portion of the Balkan peninsula ? Would not this 
mean the power to impose preferential taxes in favour of 
Austrian goods upon the whole of the Balkan States ? 
Would this be a financial futility ? The idea that war 
between civilised States cannot produce economic advan- 
tage does not bear the test of close examination." 

A Rifleman : " Struggle for Bread" (Page 105.) 



56 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Do you gather that Germany could thus add to her revenue 
without increasing her expenditure ? Would the forcible 
annexation and retention of three rebellious States reduce 
the German Chancellor's troubles ? In the light of the 
enforced abandonment by Britain of the Colonial System 
of preferential taxes and levies, do you regard the above 
schemes as workable ? 

4. " Mr. Angell writes that the case of the small States 
constitutes ' one of the most remarkable of economic- 
sociological phenomena in Europe.' It may be due to the 
innate stupidity of a militarist writer, but to me Mr. 
Angell's treatment of this very complex problem appears 
merely to stamp his reasoning as brilliant but superficial. 
From the purely military standpoint these small States 
are, in fact, far more militarily secure than their larger 
neighbours. The guiding principle of modern warfare is 
the doctrine, ' full strength on the decisive point,' and this 
decisive point is invariably the main body of the enemy's 
army, for only by decisively beating this latter in battle is 
it possible to attain a decisive result. Germany therefore 
cannot invade either Belgium or Switzerland until she has 
decisively beaten the French army, for you cannot win 
battles by marching away from the enemy, nor is it safe 
to divert a single man or gun from the near vicinity of the 
expected decisive battle. That under the military aspects 
of the problem Germany may attempt a rapid flank march 
through either Belgium or Switzerland, or both, to turn 
the French fortified frontier is of course only to be expected, 
but the point is that such movements would be but a means 
to an end, the defeat of the French army, and that only a 
very small portion of Belgian or Swiss territory would be 
traversed, and that no important fighting would take place 
on Belgian or Swiss soil. These States would, in fact, 
experience comparatively little of the horrors of war and 
sustain far less damage in credit or material resources than 
either France, if defeated, or Germany, if in like case." 

A Rifleman : " Struggle for Bread" (Page 112.) 

Does this dispose of the argument that the economic and 
financial standing of the small States shows national 
prosperity to be not dependent on military power ? 

5. " His other proposition, that the extension of national 



—AND THE PEACE 57 

territory — that is, the bringing a large amount of property 
under a single administration — is not to the financial 
advantage of a nation, appears to me as illusory as to 
maintain that business on a small capital is as profitable as 
on a large." 

Mahan : "Armaments and Arbitration.''' (Page 110.) 

Do you therefore conclude from Admiral Mohan's principle 
that the inhabitant of Russia, which is very many times 
larger than Switzerland or England, is very much 
more prosperous than the inhabitant of either of these 
other countries? 

6. "In the past, when governments were little responsible 
to the people, wars were made irrespective of popular feeling 
from motives of advantage purely. To-day all recent 
history shows that governments are reluctant to go to war ; 
but they recognise, and the people sustain them, that war 
may come, and that if it does it will expose the nation to 
vital injury to its ' financial and industrial stability.' This 
is quite different from the apprehension that the reason 
of an enemy for declaring war is to inflict such injury." 
Mahan : "Armaments and Arbitration" (Page 152.) 

// all governments are reluctant to go to war, why is there 
danger that war may come ? 

7. " There can be little doubt that these matters will be 
settled in a manner far more advantageous to the world 
by leaving them to the play of natural forces. It will be 
better to depend upon the great armaments, as institutions 
maintaining peace, which they have done effectually for 
forty years in Europe itself, and not to demoralise the 
European peoples by the flood of socialistic measures which 
will follow upon the release to a beneficiary system of the 
sums now spent on armament. It is not worth while to 
cajole ourselves with the belief that money economised 
from armament will be money saved to the State." 

Mahan : "Armaments and Arbitration.'''' (Page 13.) 
Comment on this passage. 



58 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 



CHAPTER III. 

Misconceptions as to the Nature of Government 
and the Place of Political Authority. 

This third chapter, unlike the two preceding chap- 
ters, is concerned not with a confusion in reasoning, 
but with a misconception of facts, although that mis- 
conception of facts is often complicated by the two 
forms of confused reasoning dealt with in the two 
preceding chapters. 

The misconception of facts may be sub-divided into 
two sections : (a) political ; (b) sociological. 

A Mistake About the State. 
The first — the political misconception — is indicated 
sufficiently by a passage from the Foundations of 
International Polity, which, for your convenience, I 
here reprint : 

The current conception is based upon the image 
of a State as the economic executive of its citizens, 
as a limited liability company, or its board, is the 
economic executive of its shareholders, and a 
Church is the spiritual executive of its members in 
the matter of dogma or discipline. 

I am afraid this confusion is not merely a " vulgar 
error." No less a person than Admiral Mahan 
assures us that the struggle for territory between 
nations is justified economically by the fact that 
just as a steel trust has an advantage in owning its 
own ore-fields, its stores of raw material, so a country 
has an advantage in owning colonies and conquered 
provinces. We see at once the idea : the nation is 
a commercial corporation, like a steel trust. 

Well, of course, a moment's reflection shows us 
that the analogy is an absolutely false one ; that 



—AND THE PEACE 59 

these pictures of nations as rival units competing 
one against the other bear no sort of resemblance 
to the facts. 

To begin with, the nations, except in so far as the 
carrying of letters, and in some cases the manu- 
facture of matches and tobacco, are concerned, are 
not commercial corporations at all, but political 
and administrative ones, with functions of a like 
kind to those possessed by our villages, towns, or 
counties, and Germany no more competes with 
Britain than Birmingham does with Sheffield. It is 
not the State which owns and exploits the ore-fields 
or farms, or factories, in the way that the Steel 
Trust owns its sources of raw material. The State 
merely polices and guarantees possession to the real 
owners, the shareholders, who may be foreigners. 
The mere fact that the area of political adminis- 
tration would be enlarged or contracted by the 
process which we call conquest has little more direct 
bearing upon such economic questions as the 
ownership of raw material by the populations con- 
cerned than would the enlargement of a town's 
area by the inclusion of outlying suburbs have upon 
the trading of the citizens of such towns. It is, of 
course, conceivable that they, or some, might 
incidentally gain or incidentally lose ; but an increase 
of wealth is no necessary consequence of the increase 
of municipal territory, else it would be true to say, 
" The people of Toulouse are, of course, wealthier 
than the people of Tours," or those of Birmingham 
than those of Nottingham. We know, of course, 
that we cannot determine the wealth of a person 
by the size of the town in which he lives. The 
largeness of the administrative area may be inci- 
dentally a distinct economic disadvantage, as much 
in the case of a city as in the case of a country. 

But the foregoing is only one small part of the 
fallacy of approximating a nation to a commercial 



60 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

firm. Not merely is it untrue to represent the 
nation as carrying on trade against other nations, 
untrue to represent the State as a corporation 
carrying on the trade of its people, but it is just as 
untrue to represent the nations as economic units 
in the field of international trade. We talk and 
think of " German trade " as competing in the 
world with " British trade," and we have in our 
mind that what is the gain of Germany is the loss 
of Britain, or vice versa. It is absolutely untrue. 
There is no such national conflict, no such thing as 
" British " trade or " German " trade in this sense. 
An ironmaster in Birmingham may have his trade 
taken away by the competition of an ironmaster in 
Essen, just as he may have it taken away by one 
in Glasgow, or Belfast, or Pittsburg, but in the 
present condition of the division of labour in the 
world it would be about as true to speak of Britain 
suffering by the competition of Germany as it would 
be to talk of light-haired people suffering by the 
competition of the dark-haired people, or of the 
fact that those who live in houses with even numbers 
are being driven out of business by those who live 
in odd-numbered houses. Such delimitations do 
not mark the economic delimitations ; the economic 
function cuts athwart them ; the frontiers of the 
two do not coincide ; and though we may quite 
legitimately prefer to see a British house beat a 
German one in trade, that victory will not neces- 
sarily help our group as a whole against his group 
as a whole. 

When we talk of " German " trade in the inter- 
national field, what do we mean ? Here is an 
ironmaster in Essen making locomotives for a light 
railway in an Argentine province (the capital for 
which has been subscribed in Paris), which has 
become necessary because of the export of wool to 
Bradford, where the trade has developed owing to 



—AND THE PEACE 61 

the sales in the United States, due to high prices 
produced by the destruction of sheep-runs, owing 
to the agricultural development of the West. But 
for the money found in Paris (due, perhaps, to good 
crops in wine and olives, sold mainly in London and 
New York) and the wool needed by the Bradford 
manufacturer (who has found a market for blankets 
among miners in Montana, who are smelting copper 
for a cable to China, which is needed because the 
encouragement given to education by the Chinese 
Republic has caused Chinese newspapers to print 
cable news from Europe) — but for such factors as 
these, and a whole chain of equally interdependent 
ones throughout the world, the ironmaster in Essen 
would not have been able to sell his locomotives. 
How, therefore, can you describe it as part of the 
trade of " Germany " which is in competition with 
the trade of " Britain " or " France " or " America "? 
But for the British, French and American trade it 
could not have existed at all. You may say that if 
the Essen ironmaster could have been prevented 
from selling his locomotives the trade would have 
gone to a British one. But this community of 
German workmen, called into existence by the 
Argentine trade, maintains by its consumption of 
coffee a plantation in Brazil, which buys its 
machinery in Sheffield. The destruction, there- 
fore, of the Essen trade, while it might have given 
business to the British locomotive maker, would 
have taken it from, say, a British agricultural 
implement maker. The economic interests involved 
sort themselves, irrespectively of the national 
groupings. 

The notion that it is the nations, and not the 
trades, which are the rival economic units can be 
put to a very simple test — the test of progression. 
" Great Britain " (adopting for the moment the 
ruling classification) has admittedly the greatest 



62 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

interest in foreign trade, and it is she who is supposed 
to be feeling most keenly the competition of rivals. 
Now, suppose that by some magic she could annihi- 
late all these rivals — Germany, the United States, 
Austria, France, all of them, sink them beneath the 
sea — would Great Britain be the richer ? She 
would be faced, not merely by bankruptcy, but by 
the starvation of millions of her population ; some- 
thing like a third of it would actually die for want 
of food, or leave the country. 

What, of course, we fail to realise in this con- 
nection is that trade is necessarily exchange ; if we 
are to sell anything to anyone the buyer must have 
money. He can only obtain that money by selling 
something. If we do not sell we cannot buy ; and 
so, when you come to the complex groups embracing 
all sorts of trades and industries which our modern 
nations represent, each must, in order to be a 
customer, be also a competitor. Roughly, and 
largely in the European nations, he is a customer 
to the extent that he is a competitor. It is a note- 
worthy fact, the full significance of which I have 
not space to deal with now, that it is occasionally 
those nations which most resemble one another in 
their industrial make-up that are mutually the best 
customers. Great Britain sells more per head of 
population to Belgium, a highly industrialised 
nation, than to Canada or Russia, mainly agricul- 
tural nations. 

What, however, I am dealing with here is not an 
ignorance of certain statistical facts, or a failure to 
understand certain obscure points in economics ; 
not the use of mere loose language, but a funda- 
mentally untrue conception, a false picture of the 
State in its relation to the economic activities of 
its people. 

The Division of Labour. 
Practically the whole of the main misconceptions 



—AND THE PEACE 63 

with which we are concerned in this chapter are 
dealt with in the passage just quoted. It would be 
possible to analyse them still further, but as the 
passage is already a sufficiently-condensed one, the 
effort of doing it for yourselves will show you more 
clearly than explanatory analysis could do its bearing 
on conquest, annexation, imperialism, military pro- 
tectionism, and practically all the misconceptions 
with which we have to deal. There are, however, 
further illustrations of the same proposition on pages 
xxiii, xxiv and xxv of the Introductory Summary 
to the same book. As I there point out, the division 
of labour in business and in thought, which is the 
machinery of co-operation, has brought about inter- 
dependence between groups in one nation and groups 
in another which has accomplished two things — it 
has destroyed not merely the economic, but the moral 
and intellectual unity of States, and rendered the 
exercise of force by one State against another, for 
intellectual or moral as well as for material ends, 
futile because irrelevant, and for that reason in- 
effective to promote the end in view. 

The facts here indicated, thoroughly grasped, will 
enable the reader to appreciate, in reading the chapter 
on Credit and International Relations, that international 
credit is not a device elaborated by bankers and 
financiers and disconnected with the general methods 
of society, but that it is on the contrary a necessary 
part of the whole life of modern Europe closely con- 
nected with all the other activities of mankind. 

A Passage to Answer. 

Now, as showing the application of these proposi- 
tions to the kind of problem with which we have to 
deal, take the following vigorous statement of the 
militarist case for the advantages of victory, and 
expose, step by step, the fallacies underlying it : 

" Assuming the German fleet to prove victorious . . . 



64 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

we will pass to the consideration of how far it would 
be possible for Germany to benefit economically by 
such a victory. 

"Germany's gain would be England's loss. The 
British manufacturer undersold by his German rival 
would be obviously forced from the markets, in 
every branch of our foreign trade German competi- 
tion would cut the ground from under our feet, 
British capitalists would be ruined, British workmen 
thrown out of employment, and Britain reduced to 
a mere economic appendage of the German Empire. 
Our natural wealth in coal and iron mines could not 
be wholly destroyed, but our great foreign trade 
would wither away and die under the oppressive 
influence of German sea-power as if from the touch 
of a magician's wand. We would supply Germany 
with raw materials, we would supply Germany with 
articles of luxury, the latest sartorial fashions 
perhaps, but here our commercial possibilities would 
end, Germany victorious at sea would strangle our 
trade and industries as we ourselves strangled the 
trade and industries of Ireland in the eighteenth 
century. 

" There is no conceivable reason why the German 
Government should not, under such circumstances, 
resuscitate Napoleon's Berlin decree and declare 
the British Isles to be in a state of blockade to all 
ships which had not first touched at German ports. 
Germany being by hypothesis in a position to 
actually enforce such a decree, this would act with 
disastrous effect upon British commerce. Hamburg 
and Bremen would replace London and Paris as the 
centres of the world's commerce, and become the 
universal markets for barter and exchange which, 
as we have, in our introductory chapter, noted the 
advantages conferred by a favourable position with 
regard to the world's trade routes, cannot but react 
beneficially upon German commerce. Again, by 



—AND THE PEACE 65 

giving preferential harbour dues to native shipping 
whilst exacting higher rates from foreign Powers, 
Germany could not fail to capture the world's 
carrying trade. The Englishman, unable because of 
higher harbour dues to compete in freightage with 
the German shipper, must inevitably be shouldered 
off the great trade routes. We ourselves played a 
somewhat similar game with the Dutch ; surely 
every Englishman remembers Cromwell's Naviga- 
tion Act and the part it played in building up British 
shipping. Here, then, are two distinct economic 
advantages to be gained by military conquest, nor, 
I think it will be admitted, are they inconsiderable 
ones."* 

The Confusion about the Nature of the State. 

The confidence with which this passage is written 
would probably lead the great majority of careless 
readers to accept its conclusions without question. 
Yet from beginning to end it is a tissue of bad reasoning 
based on false assumptions. 

S$jThe passage contains not only the fallacy about the 
functions of the State dealt with in this chapter, but 
also the use of an historical analogy which on examina- 
tion tells heavily against the writer's own argument, 
and a failure to realise that trade and commerce are 
matters in which two or more parties are concerned — 
an instance of the One-sided Aberration discussed in 
Chapter II. of this Part. 

With regard to the first point it should be noted that 
throughout this passage " Germany " is treated as a 
trading concern competing directly, as a business firm, 
with the other nations of the world. As soon as we 
remember that trade is not carried on by Governments 
but by individual merchants and manufacturers, and 
that one German merchant competes with another as 

* The Struggle for Bread, by " A Rifleman." The Bodley Head, London. 

E 



66 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

well as with foreign merchants, the loose reasoning of 
the writer becomes apparent. 

In what way would the victory of the German fleet 
help the German manufacturer to undersell the British 
manufacturer ? For a hundred years the British 
fleet has been supreme, but has that prevented certain 
Germans from underselling certain Britons even in 
British Colonies ? The truth is, of course, that the 
connection between naval rivalry and trade compe- 
tition is an entirely imaginary one. Underselling is 
achieved by efficiency in production, the possession of 
a good supply of cheap raw materials and by the skill 
of the artizans and merchants. The merchants of a 
country like Switzerland, without a single man-of-war, 
can and do undersell British merchants in many parts 
of the world. We have here an instance of the con- 
fusion dealt with in this chapter, the misconception 
about the nature of the State, carried to absurd 
lengths. 

Napoleon's Failure, 

When we turn to the historical analogy we have only 
to look at our history-book to see how futile Napoleon's 
Berlin Decree proved and how foolish a victorious 
Germany would be to imitate it. The following passage 
shows what the distinguished historian, Dr. Holland 
Rose, thinks of this measure. Writing of Napoleon, 
he says : 

" Very characteristic was his reply on March 24th, 
1811, to a deputation from the General Councils of 
Commerce and Manufacture in France. . . . After 
twitting the deputation with its lugubrious opinions, 
he proceeded to justify the Continental system, and 
stated that in about six months his sword would pierce 
England to the heart. As for his tariff, it would re- 
main unchanged, for it did the utmost harm to British 
trade. The French Empire would soon produce 
enough sugar, indigo, and perhaps cotton, to do 
without imports of those articles, and Europe would 



—AND THE PEACE 67 

no longer need trade with England and the Colonies. 
... As for England, she would soon be bankrupt. . . . 

" The whole address illustrates his proneness to 
illusions on the subject of commerce. That wise 
counsellor Mollien, often noted that his master had 
failed to grasp some of its essential facts ; and the 
Emperor's letters yield proof that he believed the 
extreme dearness of colonial wares in Europe to be 
more harmful to the English vendor than to the 
Continental consumer — a notion as mistaken as his 
suggestions that the confiscation of these products 
would be a good way of replenishing the coffers of 
Prussia, Westphalia, and Naples. 

"The course of events was to prove that nothing 
could shake his belief in the efficacy of these suicidal 
devices. State after State was flung into the crucible 
of his mighty experiment ; yet the looked-for result 
never came. Finally, in his constant straining after 
the one final expedient that must assure the ruin of 
England, he came to the death grapple with Russia. 
It is difficult to believe that this was the man who in 
other domains of thought sneered at ideologues. He 
himself was the chief ideologue, the supreme dupe of 
the age. As he looked round on the Europe of his day, 
he took no count of the mighty forces that were 
guiding England with the strength of youth, and were 
connecting all parts of the world by indissoluble ties ; 
what he beheld was a mirage conjured up by his vivid 
fancy and boundless egotism." 

The One-sided Aberration Again. 

We may now return to our militarist advocate in 
order to note that he is also a victim of the One-sided 
Aberration. For throughout the passage I have 
quoted he writes on the assumption that international 
trade can be the exclusive possession of the people of 
one nation ; whereas, trade being a matter of exchange, 
it is in its nature an affair concerning two or more 



(58 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

parties. Thus " Rifleman " starts off with the state- 
ment that " Germany's gain would be England's loss," 
which is equivalent to saying that if your best customer 
grows richer, you yourself will be poorer. And he 
then proceeds to suggest various measures by which 
Germany might try to increase the amount of her own 
buying and selling by decreasing the amount of buying 
and selling done by the people with whom she trades. 

Sociological Problems. 

There remains the sociological division of this 
chapter — that is to say, the problem of policing, the 
place of force in society, the defence of nationality and 
the part played by military power in its defence, the 
relation of the Western world to " inferior " races, the 
Yellow Peril, etc. 

I want, as an introduction to the study of this 
branch of the subject, to give you a hint of certain 
mechanical forces that are necessarily set in motion, 
as soon as men begin to co-operate, by so apparently 
simple a device as the division of labour ; of the 
process by which these forces so act as progressively 
to nullify the efficacy of the physical coercion of one 
party to the division of labour by another, rendering 
our current estimate of the worth, whether moral or 
material, of coercion false because it ignores the 
weight of these forces. 

I want to show first that this mode of social action, 
according to which it is to our interest to act in- 
directly against the forces of Nature — that is to say, first 
by using our energy to secure power over someone else, 
and then using that power to compel him to apply 
his energy to Nature — is uneconomic in the larger 
sense of the term ; it represents a waste of human 
effort. 

The exercise of coercion over other men necessarily 
presumes resistance (if there is no resistance, coercion 
is not necessary). The energy expended is met by the 



—AND THE PEACE 69 

resistance of the " coercee," and to the extent to 
which such resistance is effective you get merely a 
cancellation of force or energy, which is, of course, 
quite unproductive. I will try by illustration to make 
clear what may be obscure in abstract definition. 

An Illustration. 

Here are two men : one is digging, the other is 
standing over him with a whip or a weapon. We are 
apt to think of one as bond, and the other as free ; but 
both are bond. If the man with the whip or weapon 
is thirsty, and wants to go to the river to drink, he 
cannot — his slave would run away. He is sleepy and 
wants to sleep — equally he cannot. He would like to 
hunt — equally he cannot. He is bound, tied to the 
slave as much as the slave is tied to him. His work 
of control, compulsion, watching, whatever you care 
to call it, is not directly productive at all ; it is only 
indirectly productive, necessitated by the resistance 
of the slave. If we can imagine the slave driver or 
owner, wearied with this arrangement, saying to the 
slave, " I am going hunting, and if you will stay here 
and do this task during the day, I will give you half 
of the proceeds of my hunt," and the slave agreeing to 
this, you double the productivity of the two men ; 
you have two producing instead of one. Indeed, you 
have more, because if the offer is such as really to 
involve a voluntary agreement on the part of the slave 
— a desire to do the work in order to get the reward — 
all the energy which the slave originally devoted to 
looking for a chance of escape is now liberated for his 
task. This is the economic case against slavery, as 
at bottom it is the economic case against robbery, 
conquest, and every other form of human coercion, 
which means to some degree always the cancelling of 
energy by resistance, instead of its fruitful use against 
Nature, which is the final source of all wealth, however 
obtained. 



70 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Another Illustration. 

A further development of this process can be illus- 
trated in another way. Here are two tribes of one 
hundred men each living on opposite sides of the river, 
both engaged in growing corn or in some other simple 
form of agriculture. It occurs one day to one of the 
tribes that it would be much simpler to go and take 
the corn of the other tribe than to labour at growing 
corn themselves. So some fifty of the best-trained 
men sally forth to despoil their neighbours. The 
second tribe resist ; some of the fifty are killed, a 
portion of the corn is captured. The first tribe then 
argue that they did not employ force enough, and 
they begin to increase the number of their fighting 
men and, by definite training, their efficiency. The 
second tribe, determined not again to be the victims 
of spoliation, do the same, and you start a competition 
of armaments, with this result : that at the next foray 
you find seventy-five men of the first tribe ranged in 
battle against seventy-five men of the second. We 
will assume that the first tribe is successful, beats the 
seventy-five of the defenders — who, like themselves, 
have been devoting their energies to warlike training, 
and not to the production of grain — and as the result 
of their victory they capture grain produced by 
twenty-five men. Thus the result of labour in warlike 
preparations, the production of weapons, training, 
etc., of seventy-five men yields an amount of wealth 
represented by the labour of twenty-five men. Would 
not the result have been exactly three times as great 
if their forces had been turned directly against Nature 
instead of using it against men ? 

How We Depend on One Another. 

But that by no means covers, even in fundamental 

principle, the whole of the case. It will have occurred 

to you, of course, that the embryo of society is to be 

found in the division of labour. If we were not 



—AND THE PEACE 71 

compelled to divide our labour, if in order to get what 
we want it were not necessary for one to do one thing 
and one another, not only would there be no trade and 
commerce — there would be no courts of law, no society 
at all. If each could really suffice for himself, without 
the co-operation of others, we should be just in the 
condition of the animals that feed upon the plants, 
indifferent as to whether all other individuals of their 
own species disappear or not — truly independent, 
truly self-sufficing, and therefore with no obligations 
to others, and others having no obligations to us. 
But from the moment that we wear clothes, or eat 
bread, or have our teeth filled or our appendix removed, 
we cease to be independent, we cease to be indifferent 
to the disappearance of other of our species : really we 
cannot remove our own appendix. And if you make 
even a cursory list of the number of people that are 
necessary to supply your clamant daily needs, you 
will find, of course, that they number not half a dozen, 
or a dozen, or even hundreds, but, if you make the 
calculation correctly, hundreds of thousands. And if 
you have ever dreamed dreams of an ideal world in 
which you would live as part of some simple village 
community, independent of the rest of the world, I 
wonder whether you have fully considered all that is 
meant by the surrendering of such things as literature, 
music, books, being able to hear from your friends and 
writing to them, having an anaesthetic when your leg 
is to be removed as the result of an accident, saving 
your women from excessive labour — for in all ideal 
village communities the women are old at twenty-five 
as the result of unceasing physical fatigue — of seeing 
something of the world, or keeping your mother's 
portrait when she is dead. For if you are not pre- 
pared to give up these things, if you desire even the 
smallest proportion of them, you must resign yourself 
to the existence of a complex community, and to 
the communication with foreign countries, invention, 



72 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

laboratories, scientific investigation. And if you 
calculate all that this means, you will find that you are 
depending not upon this little community, but upon 
hundreds of thousands, millions of men, whom you 
have never seen and never can see, many living on the 
other side of the world, dependent upon them, it may 
be, for your very existence, as I shall shortly show. 

The important thing for the moment is that by 
division of labour you have created a condition of 
dependence upon others, and that dependence upon 
others necessarily implies a limitation of the force 
which you can use against these others. Even in 
slavery, if the master is dependent upon the labour of 
the slaves, the force he can use against them is limited 
— he cannot kill them. As the division of labour 
increases in complexity, a progressive stultification of 
force takes place, as I have detailed elsewhere. 

Interdependence Makes Force Useless. 

The fact that complete interdependence means the 
complete stultification of force is illustrated by the 
position of two men in a boat of whom I read once 
in a book of adventure. The boat was leaky, the sea 
heavy, and the shore a long way off. It took all the 
efforts of the one man to row and of the other to bale. 
If either had ceased, both would have drowned. At 
one point the rower threatened the baler that if he did 
not bale with more energy, he would throw him over- 
board ; to which the baler made the obvious reply 
that if he did, he (the rower) would certainly drown 
also. And as the rower was really dependent upon 
the baler, and the baler upon the rower, neither could 
use force against the other. The threat of death itself 
became ineffective in such circumstances. 

To the degree, then, to which interdependence is 
complete, force becomes ineffective. 

How Communications bring about Interdependence. 
But I want to indicate certain other factors that 



—AND THE PEACE 73 

operate. Imagine two villages separated for most 
months of the year by an impenetrable swamp. In 
this condition each village is compelled to produce 
nearly all that it needs itself — the condition of most 
villages in Europe a generation or two ago. But 
imagine that the swamp has been cut by a canal, 
and that the situation of one of these villages is par- 
ticularly suitable for the production of foodstuffs, and 
the other for the production of metals and fuel. 
What will inevitably happen is that, as the result of 
this improvement in communication and cheapening 
of transport, one village will be mainly engaged upon 
producing foodstuffs, and the other upon producing 
coal and iron. In a greater or lesser degree they will 
make an exchange of their products. Now, in the 
first condition, where there was no exchange, and 
where each village produced all that it needed, one can 
imagine the men of the first village attacking the 
second, raiding it, carrying off its goods, and not 
themselves suffering even by the annihilation of the 
second village. (It was the condition of border villages 
a century or two ago.) But after the construction of 
the canal, when the improvement of communication 
has led them to divide their labour, it would serve 
little purpose for the miners to wage war against 
the food producers ; and if in doing so they wiped them 
out in the old-fashioned way, they would be threatened 
with starvation. And the condition of interdependence 
would be none the less even if it were indirect — that is 
to say, if one village, mainly agricultural, annoyed at 
paying too much for its implements, raided a second 
village where they were made, and ruined the pur- 
chasing power of this village so that it could no longer 
buy the coal of a third village, which happened to be 
the main market of the agriculturists of the first 
village. Although you may find your market in 
consumer A, you will ruin it, perhaps, by attacking B, 
upon whom A is dependent. 



74 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

The Change in One Hundred Years. 

Now, you know, of course, that that is the con- 
dition of the modern world. The intercommunication 
represented by the canal, which renders possible the 
division of labour between otherwise separated com- 
munities, and without which such division of labour 
is not possible, is the characteristic factor of our time. 
I think it is certainly true to say that one hundred 
years ago communication was less effective in Europe 
than it had been two thousand years previously. 
But this last one hundred years has drawn capitals at 
opposite sides of the world more closely together, and 
placed them in more intimate communication than 
neighbouring country towns in the same state were in 
before the day of steam and telegraphy. And yet we 
assume that the relationships between these groups, 
transformed as they must be by this marvellous new 
element of interdependence, are exactly what they were 
before it existed. I am not exaggerating. It is 
positively laid down by our greatest authorities on the 
relations of nations that the factor of power, of force, 
is what it was in the days of Caesar, of Machiavelli, of 
Clause witz ; that of fundamental change there is none. 
Yet the factor of communication represents progressive 
forces which must fundamentally transform the rela- 
tionships between the communities affected by them. 
That canal, obviously representing a revolution in the 
relationship of those two villages, is yet declared by 
the wise men of those two villages in no way to affect 
that relationship ! 

How Ideas have not Changed. 

It is, of course, not the mere fact of contact which 
has rendered them interdependent, but the division of 
labour which that improvement of communication 
has brought about — the new fact that the prosperity 
of either of these communities is conditional upon the 
due performance of its functions by the other. 



—AND THE PEACE 75 

Not only does existing political and economic 
literature still employ the language of international 
conditions which have in fact disappeared, but the 
underlying ideas of such literature ignore characteristic 
developments of our time. If one compares an average 
modern treatise on a problem of international politics — 
whether it takes the form of a leading article in a news- 
paper, or the more pretentious treatment of a quarterly 
review, or the books of any recognised authority on the 
subject — with a corresponding treatise of the eighteenth 
century, it will be found that the language and ideas 
are fundamentally identical, the evident assumption 
on the part of the twentieth- century writer being that 
the essential facts of the problem have not changed. 
Yet the facts have so changed as to render what were 
obvious truths in the eighteenth century absurdities 
in the twentieth. 

A further attempt is made to show the character 
of human co-operation in many passages in The Great 
Illusion and The Foundations of International Polity — 
notably, for instance, pages 186-194 and all Chapter IV., 
Part II., of The Great Illusion, and pages xxi to 
xlviii and all Chapters III. and IV. of Polity. 

It is of the utmost importance to get a clear idea of 
how the thing works before worrying about discon- 
nected facts : the process, the general law, are so 
infinitely more important in the first instance than the 
facts which they explain. 

Some Great Questions for Study. 

As part of the larger sociological division of the 
subject, one may include the relationship of the 
inferior races, the Yellow Peril, and so forth. Of course, 
if Western civilisation is really threatened by the Yellow 
Peril, it is high time we composed our imaginary 
differences between ourselves. A united Western 
civilisation would not have much to fear from the 
yellow man ; a disunited Western civilisation might 



76 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

conceivably be overthrown. But some of the economic 
errors underlying the fear of the yellow man — cheap 
labour and the rest of it — are precisely the errors 
with which we have been dealing. It will clarify 
our minds on the subject if we apply them to the 
problem of the lower races. 

Of course there is a very large literature dealing 
with our relations to Asiatic and other inferior races, 
from John Stuart Mill down, but it is hardly necessary 
even to indicate it. I would suggest, however, that the 
problems connected with mixed races might well be 
studied by taking a practical example. 

A Practical Example. 

Spanish America, especially countries like Brazil, 
with their mixture of white, negro, Indian, and some- 
times Asiatic, on the whole a fairly successful mixture, 
is bound to modify some of the easy-going theories 
which have been popular of recent years. When one 
sees, as I have seen, a Brazilian millionaire, in whose 
veins runs the blood of all the races I have mentioned, 
dining cheek by jowl with, and as the host of, a member 
of one of the Royal Houses of Europe, talking French 
with him on subjects implying wide reading and culti- 
vated ideas, and then remembers that this same Brazi- 
lian would in New York be refused admission to any 
but low-class negro hotels, would, if his race were 
recognised, not be allowed to enter a railway train 
except in the Jim Crow car, one can realise that 
interesting things are going to happen, especially also 
when these same " niggers " begin to marry their 
heavily dowered daughters to scions of the European 
nobility. 

Suggestions about Books. 

The bibliography of this, the third, chapter is, of 
course, a very large one, but I would underline the 
following books : 

Hartley Withers' Meaning of Money. 



—AND THE PEACE 77 

Bastiat's Economic Sophisms. 

Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of 
the Nineteenth Century. 

Finot's Race Prejudice. 

David Starr Jordan's The Blood of the Nations. 

William Sumner's War, and Other Essays, published 
by the Oxford University Press. 

David Jayne Hill's World Organisation and the 
Modern State. 

Of the modern writers on our relations with the black 
races, Bryce and E. D. Morel are particularly worth 
attention. Of the recent books dealing with the his- 
torical side of the subject, H. S. Perris's Pax Britannica 
(particularly dealing with Anglo-American relations) 
is useful, as is also G. H. Perris's History of War and 
Peace, published in the Home University Library. 

Hints to Readers. 

To those who have given much effort to thrashing 
out an intricate subject, the following recommendation 
will hardly be necessary. Never tackle a book with 
the idea of swallowing it whole, of absorbing all the 
facts that it contains pell-mell. Having formed an 
assumption or working hypothesis, see how the facts 
presented by a given author bear on that one assump- 
tion or hypothesis. One assumes, for instance, on the 
basis of previously observed facts, that the process 
by which Europe achieved religious toleration was 
about as follows : The object of the respective religious 
reformers of the Renaissance was not the establishment 
of toleration, but the enforcement each of his own 
particular dogma. But the need of establishing one 
dogma as against another involved necessarily an 
appeal to argument and reason, and finally the uncon- 
scious adoption of the method of experimenting and 
proving each step, and the increasing employment of 
this method changed the mental attitude of all those 
intellectually active in Europe ; its employment was 



78 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

still further stimulated by the wonderful results which 
it gave in the field of physical research, and the change 
of mental attitude on the part of those active in the 
affairs of the world brought about that state of mind 
which stopped the religious wars and gave us liberty 
from religious tyranny, a thing which, but for this 
change in mental outlook, governmental regulation 
of itself could never have secured. 

With this method of reading clearly in mind, take, 
for instance, Lecky's History of Rationalism, for the one 
sole purpose of seeing what light it throws on your 
hypothesis. In reading reject everything that does 
not throw any light thereon, and, having read the book 
for that purpose, it will be quite possible to read it all 
again for the light it may throw on a quite different 
matter. Just to read at large is, I should judge, from 
certain necessarily limited observations which I have 
been able to make, worse then useless ; it merely 
befuddles the mind of otherwise intelligent men. I 
suppose we all have the experience that some of the 
stupidest people we know are those who have read 
the most books. The net result of their reading is 
to give the type of mind revealed in those magazines 
of useful information that used to be published in the 
'seventies and 'eighties, when apparently millions were 
thrilled to learn that the word " chariot " was mentioned 
in the Old Testament 1,742 times ; or that the postage 
stamps used annually by the Bank of England would 
cover Clapham Common. 



Such, then, are the three chapters of this discussion. 
The analysis of itself will do little more to ensure good 
reasoning on the subject than a knowledge of the 
" parts of speech " does to ensure good speech. But 
it will be of service, if applied, in the detection of 
definite errors. 

The student will have realised at this stage that very 
many, perhaps most, of the questions with which he 



—AND THE PEACE 79 

has to deal touch upon all the divisions — that is to say- 
that in dealing with any one question he will have to 
call in some measure on all of the three divisions. 

The Method Applied. 

Take the case of the Daily Mail leader-writer who 
says that, " notwithstanding all our protestations of a 
desire for peace and our homage thereto, the sentiment 
of nationality will always oppose an insuperable 
barrier to the realisation of that ideal. For in defending 
their nationality men will always forget that war does 
not ' pay,' and will whip out their swords without any 
consideration whatever of that point." 

Here, of course, one has to call on the first division 
of our subject in order to show that the sentiment of 
nationality is not an unchanging force from the out- 
side — that it has been modified, changed, and trans- 
formed within the last three hundred years ; that it 
declines a,nd increases with the centuries, owing to the 
passage of ideas from mind to mind, of discussion of 
facts, of exchange of experience ; that it is influenced 
by such factors as the lucidity of a writer or a group 
of writers, like those which arose in France in the 
middle of the eighteenth century. While we are dis- 
cussing it it is changing, and while the Daily Mail 
leader-writer is writing he himself is weakening or 
strengthening a given conception. And yet he talks 
as though he, being part of the people or the nation, 
were the helpless victim of an outside force which he 
cannot even question or divert in however small 
degree. The philosophy and the facts are against him 
on that point. 

We have to take in the second division of our 
subject in order to show that nationality can never be 
threatened by the preference of a people for their own 
country. It is only threatened by the preference of 
people for other people's countries. Nationality can 
never suffer from the desire to preserve our own ; only 



80 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

from the desire to destroy somebody else's. If we 
really believe in nationality and the right to it, as we 
believe in the right to religious faith — our own as well as 
other people's — nationality would be in as little danger 
from war as is the Catholicism of Cardinal Bourne 
from the British Army, or the Conservatism of Mr. 
Balfour from the Territorials. And we have to call on 
the third division of our subject in order to show that 
the mere fact of a German victory would not wipe 
English law, literature, or language from the earth, 
any more than the mere fact of German victory in 
1871 wiped French literature and French intellectual 
influence from Europe. 

And in dealing with this last subject we have to 
show the inter-relation of economic and moral factors — 
show that it is precisely the intangibility of material 
wealth which makes it impossible for a conqueror to 
uproot intellectual or spiritual possessions. 

1 think it will be realised that, without the analysis 
which we have just undertaken, the immediate and 
instantaneous exposure of the nature of the fallacies 
underlying the leader-writer's plea would hardly be 
possible. 

The following quotations from representative mili- 
tarist writers should be examined and answered in a 
similar way. 

QUESTIONS ON PART II., CHAPTER III. 

1. " Eliminate, if you can, the competition between the 
several nationalities, so as to suppress the armaments ; 
substitute for these the artificial system of compulsory 
arbitration and disarmament, and you will have realised 
a socialistic community of States, in which the powers of 
individual initiative, of nations and of men, the great 
achievement of our civilisation so far, will gradually be 
atrophied. The result may be that European civilisation 
will not survive, having lost the fighting energy which 
heretofore has been inherent in its composition." 

Mahan : Armaments and Arbitration. (Page 10.) 






—AND THE PEACE 81 

Do you regard the population of the States of the British 
Empire — Australia, Canada, etc. — which have never seen 
war, and are removed from the more pressing likelihood 
of it, as standing in danger of the failure of individual 
initiative ? Or as comparing badly in this respect with 
the populations of those South American States, or the 
States of South-eastern Europe, that have known much 
war? 

2. " The natural law, to which all laws of Nature can 
be reduced, is the law of struggle. All intrasocial property, 
all thoughts, inventions, and institutions, as, indeed, the 
social system itself, are a result of the intrasocial struggle, 
in which one survives and another is cast out. The extra- 
social, the supersocial, struggle, which guides the external 
development of societies, nations, and races, is war. The 
internal development, the intrasocial struggle, is man's 
daily work — the struggle of thoughts, feelings, wishes, 
sciences, activities. The outward development, the super- 
social struggle, is the sanguinary struggle of nations — 
war. In what does the creative power of this struggle 
consist ? In growth and decay, in the victory of the one 
factor and in the defeat of the other ! This struggle is a 
creator since it eliminates." 

Clauss Wagner : Der Kreigals schaffendes Weltprinzip. 
(Quoted by Bernhardi, page 11.) 

" National entities, in their birth, activities and death, 
are controlled by the same laws that govern all life — plant, 
animal, or national — the law of struggle, the law of survival 

. . The idea of international arbitration as a substitute 
for natural laws that govern the existence of political 
entities arises not only from a denial of their fiats and an 
ignorance of their application, but from a total miscon- 
ception of war, its causes, and its meaning." 

General Homer Lea : Valour of Ignorance. 

Do you conclude from the foregoing that it would be better for 
the English and the Scotch to be still at war ? If not, how 
is the assumption underlying these passages vitiated? 
Which of these two nations has been " eliminated " in 
keeping with the alleged Law of Survival ? What is the 
common misreading of the biological analogy reflected in 
these passages ? 



82 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

3. " National power is surely a legitimate factor in inter- 
national settlements ; for it is the outcome of nationa 
efficiency, and efficiency is entitled to assert its fair position 
and chance of exercise in world matters." 

Mahan : Armaments and Arbitration. (Page 84.) 

" The existence of might is no mere casual attribute, 
but the indication of qualities which should, as they 
assuredly will, make their way to the front and to the top 
in the relations of States." 

Mahan : Armaments and Arbitration. (Page 85.) 

" Military efficiency is not a quality which stands alone 
or can be considered by itself ; military efficiency is but a 
symptom of national efficiency . . . every great ruling 
race which has strongly impressed the world's history has 
been equally prominent in the arts of war and peace . . . 
the decay of one quality merely symptomises the decay of 
others . . . hence the warlike nation does inherit the 
earth." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 179.) 

Give a list of the warlike nations of the earth — that is to say, 
the nations whose populations have fought much (in the 
New World as well as in the Old) — and a list of those 
nations which during the last generation or so have fought 
little ; then indicate why you regard the first list as 
expanding and rising nations and the second as dying 
or decaying. 

4. " This highest expansion can never be realised in 
pure individualism. Man can only develop his highest 
capacities when he takes his part in a community, in a 
social organism, for which he lives and works. He must 
be in a family, in a society, in the State, which draws the 
individual out of the narrow circles in which he otherwise 
would pass his life, and makes him a worker in the great 
common interests of humanity. The State alone, so 
Schleiermacher once taught, gives the individual the highest 
degree of life. 

" War, from this standpoint, will be regarded as a moral 
necessity, if it is waged to protect the highest and most 
valuable interests of a nation. As human life is now con- 



—AND THE PEACE 83 

stituted, it is political idealism which calls for war, while 
materialism — in theory, at least — repudiates it. 

" If we grasp the conception of the State from this higher 
aspect, we shall soon see that it cannot attain its great moral 
ends unless its political power increases. The higher object 
at which it aims is closely correlated to the advancement 
of its material interests. It is only the State which strives 
after an enlarged sphere of influence that creates the con- 
ditions under which mankind develops into the most 
splendid perfection. The development of all the best 
human capabilities and qualities can only find scope on 
the great stage of action which power creates. But when 
the State renounces all extension of power, and recoils 
from every war which is necessary for its expansion ; when 
it is content to exist, and no longer wishes to grow ; when 
' at peace on sluggard's couch it lies,' then its citizens 
become stunted. The efforts of each individual are 
cramped, and the broad aspect of things is lost. This is 
sufficiently exemplified by the pitiable existence of all 
small States, and every great Power that mistrusts itself 
falls a victim to the same curse." 

Bernhardi : Germany and the Next War. (Page 18.) 
Do you gather from this that the Russian must be a higher 

type than the Swiss or Belgian, who share in " the pitiable 

existence " of a small State ? 
5. " The armaments of European States now are not so 
much for protection against conquest as to secure to them- 
selves the utmost possible share of the unexploited or 
imperfectly exploited regions of the world — the outlying 
markets, or storehouses of raw material, which, under 
national control, shall minister to national emolument. 
The case is much like that of the ownership of ore-fields 
by the Steel Trust, of which we have heard so much ; the 
natural, and certainly not unwise, wish of the manufacturer 
to command his own sources of fuel and raw materials." 
Mahan : Armaments and Arbitration. (Page 113.) 
" It is the great amount of unexploited raw material in 
territories politically backward, and now imperfectly pos- 
sessed by the nominal owners, which at the present moment 
constitutes the temptation and the impulse to war of 
European States." 

Mahan : Armaments and Arbitration. (Page 110.) 

F* 



84 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

" A vigorous colonial policy, too, will certainly improve 
the national prosperity if directed, on the one hand, to 
producing in our own colonies the raw materials which our 
industries derive in immense quantities from foreign 
countries, and so making us gradually independent of 
foreign countries ; and, on the other hand, to transforming 
our colonies into an assured market for our goods by 
effective promotion of settlements, railroads, and cultiva- 
tion. The less we are tributaries of foreign countries, to 
whom we pay many milliards, the more our national wealth 
and the financial capabilities of the State will improve." 
Bernhardi : Germany and the Next War. (Page 272.) 

Do you consider that the facts of colonial history on the one 
hand and industrial history on the other confirm the 
assumptions here made ? 
What is the difference in commercial fact between the " con- 
trol" of Canadian wheat fields by the British Government 
and the ownership of ore-fields by a Steel Trust ? 
In actual practice does political control ensure favourable 
purchasing terms ? Can raw material be obtained other 
than by purchase ? 
6. " Disarmament will not abolish war, you cannot abolish 
war from a competitive system of civilisation ; competition 
is the root-basis of such a system of civilisation, and competi- 
tion is war. When a business firm crushes a trade rival 
from the markets by cut-prices there is exactly the same 
process at work as when a business nation crushes a trade 
rival by physical force ; the means vary, but the end in 
view and the ethical principles in question are identical ; 
in both cases the weaker goes to the wall : in both cases it 
is woe to the vanquished." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 209.) 

" So the German, the Englishman, the Frenchman, and 
the American all produce a far greater quantity of manu- 
factured goods fe than their own countryfolk can consume, 
and so all alike seek to dispose of their goods abroad, either 
to people who do not produce such goods, but have natural 
resources either in timber, wheat, &c, by which they can 
pay for them, such as the Argentine Republic, India, 
Canada, &c, or to one another ; but if the Englishman 
sells goods in Germany he is competing with the German 



—AND THE PEACE 85 

manufacturer, and if the German sells goods in England it 
is vice versa, and so on throughout the world. And if the 
Englishman sells goods in Turkey or Argentina he is taking 
trade from the German, and if the German sells goods in 
either of these countries — or any other country come to 
that — he is taking trade from the Englishman ; and the 
well-being of every inhabitant of the great manufacturing 
towns, such as London, Paris, or Berlin, is bound up in the 
power of the capitalist to sell his wares ; and the production 
of manufactured articles has outstripped the natural 
increase of demand by 67 per cent., therefore new markets 
must be found for these wares or the existing ones be 
4 forced ' ; hence the rush for colonies and feverish trade 
competition between the great manufacturing countries. 
And the production of manufactured goods is still increas- 
ing, and the great cities must sell their wares or starve. 
Now we understand what trade-rivalry really is. It resolves 
itself, in fact, into the struggle for bread." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 54.) 

If Jones of Leeds is selling harvesting machinery to a ranch 
in the Argentine, which is exporting its wheat to German 
workmen manufacturing rails for China, why is it false 
to represent England and Germany as rival business 
firms competing for trade in South America ? 

Is available " trade " limited in amount ? Can armed force 
be used to compel people to buy a certain make of manu- 
factured goods ? 

7. " Such was the fate of the invaders so long as the 
Roman Empire retained its military efficiency unimpaired, 
but when, owing to incapacity in high places and insub- 
ordination in low, the Roman army failed to cope with the 
invader, then it was a different story. Fair provinces were 
ravaged and towns stormed and sacked, fire and sword 
made havoc of one of the most refined luxurious civilisations 
the world has ever seen, the Empire of the West crumbled 
to pieces in an orgy of lust and brutality, delicate Roman 
ladies became the slaves of dirty, greasy, evil-smelling 
barbarian lords, stately villas sank in flames and ashes, a 
riot of bloodshed swept over Gaul, Spain, and even Italia 
itself, and the cause of all this was that far to the north 
some obscure barbarian people, equally unknown to history, 



86 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

the Romans, or their invaders, was hungry. And a like 
cause produced not one war, but a whole cycle of wars, and 
not one cycle of wars, but every cycle of wars ever since the 
world began." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 23.) 

The Picts invaded England " because they were hungry" and 
as Scotland is now much more thickly populated than 
then, are we to expect another Scots' invasion ? Europe 
supports a hundred times the population to-day that it 
did in the time of the Romans. Has this extra food been 
produced by war or co-operation ? Would Europe be 
less or more hungry if it returned to the days of perpetual 
fighting ? 

8. " Strong, healthy, and flourishing nations increase in 
numbers. From a given moment they require a continual 
expansion of their frontiers, they require new territory for 
the accommodation of their surplus population. Since 
almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory 
must, as a rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors — 
that is to say by conquest, which thus becomes a law of 
necessity." 

Bernhardi : Germany and the Next War. (Page 14.) 

" Here we are up against the hard root of the whole 
international problem ever since the coming of Bismarck 
some fifty years ago. The key of European politics is the 
magnificent organisation of Germany for war, industry, and 
science — its central position in mid-Europe abutting on 
seven different States — its poor access to the sea and its 
expanding population, hidebound on every side by hostile 
and suspicious neighbours, and, to crown all, its limitless 
pride, ambition, and thirst for dominion. A mighty nation 
of 65,000,000, with such superb resources both for peace 
and war, and such overweening pride in its own superiority 
and might, finds itself closed up in a ring-fence too narrow 
for its fecundity as for its pretensions, constructed more by 
history, geography and circumstances than by design — 
a fence maintained by the fears rather than the hostility 
of its weaker neighbours. That is the rumbling subter- 
ranean volcano on which the European State system rests." 

" It is inevitable but that a nation with the magnificent 



—AND THE PEACE 87 

resources of the German, hemmed in a territory so inade- 
quate to their needs and pretensions, and dominated by a 
soldier, bureaucratic and literary caste, all deeply imbued 
with the Bismarekian doctrine, should thirst to extend their 
dominions and their power at any sacrifice — of life, of 
wealth and of justice. One must take facts as they are, 
and it is idle to be blind to facts, or to rail against them. 
It is as silly to gloss over manifest perils as it is to preach 
moralities about them. There they are . . . England, 
Europe, civilisation is in imminent peril from German 
expansion. 

" In what quarter is the peril probable, and in which 
way is it to be met ? Now, more than ever, it is to be 
looked for in Europe, after the great changes made, and 
others imminent, in South-East Europe. With our fleet 
in the highest state of development, anything like attack 
upon it, or on these islands, may be reasonably put aside. 
It is not indeed impossible, especially under the new 
conditions of aerial machines. And due preparation must 
be made to meet it. But the far more imminent risk is 
that Belgium, Northern France, Holland, either one or all, 
may be the object of assault ; or in the case of the Low 
Countries, of practical control without actual war. We 
know that systematic preparation for this has long been 
made." 

Frederic Harrison : English Review, January, 1913. 

Is Germany at present overcrowded ? What is the density of 
its population compared with Belgium ? Did anything 
prevent Germans from going to any part of the world ? 
The Low Countries being more densely populated than 
Germany, would it relieve her population-pressure to 
annex these areas ? 

9. " Leaving this argument for the nonce, let us pass on 
to consider the economic loss to Great Britain which would 
result from the loss of Canada. The only Power which 
can be seriously conceived as effecting the conquest of 
Canada is, of course, the United States, and, bearing in 
mind the relative population, wealth, and military power 
of the two countries, the great superiority possessed by the 
Americans would render such a conquest, provided that the 
Dominion received no military aid from Great Britain, a 



88 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

matter of little difficulty. How would this affect British 
commerce ? Our trade with Canada was in 1910 valued 
at £45,269,675, being British manufactured goods exported 
to Canada and Canadian foodstuffs imported in exchange, 
but Canada under American rule would become a mere 
economic appendage of the United States, a protective 
tariff would bar out British goods, which at present receive 
preferential treatment, and the American manufacturer, at 
present shut out from the Canadian market by the tariff- 
line, would flood the Western market with manufactured 
goods, taking, of course, in exchange the Canadian food- 
stuffs. Result, a dead loss to British trade." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 181.) 

" Now let us conceive of a decisive defeat of the British 
fleet, and that Great Britain be humbled from her proud 
position as mistress of the seas. How long would it be ere 
Japanese armies landed in Australia or seized the Indian 
seaports ? (India, be it remarked, has once been con- 
quered from the sea, and may be so a second time.) How 
long would it be ere Russia came down on India from the 
north ? How long before Germany landed troops at Cape 
Town and Port Elizabeth ? And how long before our 
American cousins discovered that it was the manifest 
destinies of Canada and the West India Isles to become 
parts of the American Union ? From every quarter of the 
globe the rats would gather to devour the dying carcase, 
and how would this affect British industry ? The capture 
of our Australian trade by Japan, the capture of our Indian 
trade by Russia, the capture of our South African trade by 
Germany, the capture of our Canadian trade by America, 
an enormous war indemnity to pay off, and the markets in 
confusion. Ruined capitalists, silent factories and un- 
employed — that is the answer." 

A Rifleman : Struggle for Bread. (Page 132.) 

" We have lost command of every sea but one — the 
North Sea — and our supremacy over that sea is now a 
matter of dispute. In other words, whereas your fore- 
fathers traded as of right on every sea, now you only trada 
by the sufferance of other Powers." 

Lord Roberts, at Manchester. 



—AND THE PEACE 89 

Do you regard as sound the three assumptions here made : 
(1) That it is British armaments alone which prevent the 
United States attacking Canada, and (2) that a territory 
which is not under our political control is no use to us 
commercially ? (3) That the stronger nation can suppress 
the trade of the weaker ? If so, how do you reconcile these 
assumptions with (a) the fact that along the Canadian 
frontier there is not a fort or gun for protection against 
the United States ? (b) That our overseas trade with 
territories which we do not control politically is very much 
larger than with that which we do ? (c) That we have not 
been able to suppress German commercial competition in 
the past by virtue of our superior navy ? 

10." Since England committed the unpardonable blunder, 
from her point of view, of not supporting the Southern 
States in the American War of Secession, a rival to England's 
world-wide Empire has appeared on the other side of the 
Atlantic in the form of the United States of North America, 
which are a grave menace to England's fortunes. The 
keenest competition conceivable now exists between the 
two countries. The annexation of the Philippines by 
America, and England's treaty with Japan, have accen- 
tuated the conflict of interests between the two nations. 
The trade and industries of America can no longer be 
checked, and the absolutely inexhaustible and ever-growing 
resources of the Union are prodigious. ..." 

Bernhardi : Germany and the Next War. (Page 92.) 

" How can Russia, Austria, Hungary remain unmoved, 
when the physical, material, and moral status of their 
Balkan neighbours is utterly transformed ? Thus, to 
Russia the defence of Slavonian interests, the freedom of 
the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, is what sea-power is 
to England. To the Germans of Austria, to the Magyars 
of Hungary, the predominance of the Slav races is their 
deposition as ascendant peoples. To Germany, to allow 
the Germans of Austria to be deposed from Empire is an 
intolerable blow to Pan-Germanic dreams. To Magyars, 
to have the despised Servians prospering and advancing, 
whilst they are pinned between Germans, Poles, Russians, 
and Roumanians, is a sorry prospect for a proud race. To 
England it is of vital importance that the Black Sea, the 



90 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

Bosphorus, the Hellespont, and the iEgean coasts and 
islands, should not be in hostile hands. To France and to 
Italy this is nearly as vital. Could the Powers of Europe, 
great and small, be knotted up together in a more intricate 
entanglement — a series of vicious circles more insoluble ? " 
Frederic Harrison : English Review, January, 1913. 

Is it advantageous or otherwise to a nation that other States 
should prosper ? Do you deem that a powerful America 
necessarily threatens Great Britain ? 



—AND THE PEACE 91 



PART III. 



THE NEXT PRACTICAL STEP. 

WE have seen in the first chapter that the under- 
lying causes of this war are fear, each party 
of the other, and possibly unavowed ambi- 
tions for world-wide empires and political power. 
That such ambitions do exist very generally in the 
great European States, being, indeed, very often the 
form that the national pride of their people takes, is 
undoubted. Each people alleges that it would never 
allow this pride to betray it into aggression upon its 
neighbour ; but the sentiment exists, and in any 
differences that arise must necessarily influence the 
idea which each party forms of its own rights and those 
of its neighbours, tending to make these ideas such that 
conflict is rendered very much more probable. Any 
plan, therefore, which aims at attaining a more secure 
and general peace in the future should have as its 
main object a satisfactory means of avoiding these 
two causes of war. 

The Need for Understanding. 
Whatever measures the governments may take, it is 
quite certain that they will not secure permanent peace 
unless the peoples of Europe make a much greater 
effort than they have done in the past to understand 
international relationships. Unfortunately there is 
always a possibility that nations will rush into war if 
they believe that their vital interests are threatened, 
or that they are bound in honour to try and settle 
some disputed question in this way. The first and 
most important thing, therefore, is for people to study 



92 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

and try to understand the real facts of the case. When 
the great mass of the people in each country realise 
that no nation can gain anything of real value by 
attacking or robbing its neighbour, and that war is 
the very worst and most useless way of trying to settle 
disputes — because of itself it never settles anything 
permanently — their governments will not be able to 
drag them into war even if they wished to do so. On 
the other hand, so long as the people generally do not 
clearly understand these points, there will always 
be a danger that even wise and prudent statesmen may 
have their hands forced by some foolish outbreak of 
popular passion. It cannot be too often repeated that 
" war is the failure of human wisdom," and that the 
one certain way to avoid it is for men to try and make 
themselves wiser. 

Meantime, however, there are certain definite steps 
which can be taken which, though they will not of 
themselves remove all danger of war, will remove a 
great many of the more likely sources of quarrel, and 
will make it easier for people to realise that the nations 
of the civilised world are not really rivals having 
opposed interests, but partners who share in each 
other's prosperity and cannot damage each other 
without self -in jury. 

A Real Settlement. 

It is very important that at the end of this war the 
victorious party should not be animated by the old 
principle of " woe to the vanquished." If, as we hope, 
the Allies are victorious, we may hope that they will 
be guided by the principles expressed by M. Cambon, 
the French Ambassador to London, when he said, " We 
do not seek to gratify any lust for conquest and 
domination ; we merely seek to save European civilisa- 
tion " ; and by Mr. A. J. Balfour in the words : " We 
fight not for ourselves alone but for civilisation, for 
the cause of all small States, for the cause of all those 



—AND THE PEACE 93 

countries which desire to develop their own civilisation 
in their own way, following their own ideals and with- 
out interference from any insolent and unauthorised 
aggressor." 

If this is so, they will not think merely of what 
terms they can extort for themselves, but will call a 
general conference of the nations, not merely to decide 
the actual terms of peace, but to settle as far as possible 
all the open questions which have troubled the peace 
of Europe so long and have involved so heavy a burden 
of armaments. In this way it might be possible to 
get not a mere truce — an interval of peace after which 
the beaten side would again begin to fight for revenge — 
but a real settlement based on justice and agreement 
and having therefore a good chance of permanency. 
It is not, of course, possible to foretell just what the 
position will be, nor is this the place to make detailed 
suggestions as to the terms of such a settlement ; but 
there are two or three general principles which seem 
to follow from a study of the considerations which we 
have been examining. 

Government by Consent. 
If the peoples are sincere in their readiness to 
renounce aggressive intentions against their neigh- 
bours, it should not be impossible to secure general 
support to the undertaking that in future no province 
shall be transferred from one government to another 
by an unwelcome ruler ; or even retained save by the 
consent of its population. If this principle were 
really operative in Europe, it would, of itself, almost 
rid us of the danger of war ; for no country would go 
to war for the purpose of conquering a province which 
it would later on be unable to annex, and if the pro- 
vince were in favour of such annexation in any case, 
and there was an agreement rendering this possible 
by the consent of those concerned, there would be no 
need to go to war to achieve this end. 



94 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

In the newer Europe, therefore, which we hope may 
follow from this war a strong and definite attempt 
should be made to secure as large a recognition as 
possible of the principle of deciding all territorial 
changes or modifications simply and purely according 
to the desires of the people inhabiting the disputed 
territories, who might in most cases be asked to record 
their wishes by what is called a " plebiscite," a general 
poll of the community. The ultimate object should 
be to push home as far as possible the great democratic 
principle of government by consent. 

It is very much to be hoped that not only will this 
principle be applied in the future, but that the confer- 
ence which meets after the war will apply it at once 
to the case of some of those subject provinces which 
constitute a continual source of unquiet. It may not 
matter very much whether these provinces are made 
altogether independent or whether they are grouped 
together in a confederation of States having complete 
local autonomy. The important thing is that there 
should be no holding down of unwilling populations, 
and that people of the same race who wish to form 
one nation should not be forcibly kept apart. It is 
the feeling that people of the same race as your own 
are being ill-treated in a neighbouring State which has 
led to much of the race hatred of Europe, and if we 
can get rid of these causes of internal unrest we may 
well hope that much of the fear and hostility between 
States will disappear with it. The reasons which 
underlie this whole idea were very well expressed by 
Mr. Winston Churchill in his speech at the London 
Opera House, when he said : 

" The more you study this question the more you 
will see that the use the Germans made of their three 
victorious wars, against Denmark, against Austria and 
against France, has been such as to make them the 
terror and the bully of Europe, the enemy and the 
menace of every small State upon their borders, and a 



—AND THE PEACE 95 

perpetual source of unrest and disquietude to their 
powerful neighbours. Now the war has come, and 
when it is over let us be careful not to make the same 
mistake or the same sort of mistake as Germany made 
when she had France prostrate at her feet in 1870. 
Let us, whatever we do, fight for and work towards 
great and sound principles for the European system. 
The first of these principles which we should keep 
before us is the principle of nationality — that is to say, 
not the conquest or subjugation of any great com- 
munity, or of any strong race of men, but the setting 
free of those races which have been subjugated and 
conquered. And if doubt arises about disputed areas 
of country, we should try to settle their ultimate 
destination in the reconstruction of Europe which 
must follow from this war with a fair regard to the 
wishes and feelings of the people who live in them. 
That is the aim which, if it is achieved, will justify the 
exertions of the war, and will make some amend to 
the world for the loss and agony of suffering which it 
has wrought and entailed, and which will give to those 
who come after us not only the pride we hope they 
will feel in remembering the martial achievement of 
the present age of Britain, but which will give them 
also a better and a fairer world to live in and a Europe 
free from the causes of hatred and unrest which have 
poisoned the comity of nations and ruptured the peace 
of Christendom." 

Guarantees. 
It will perhaps be desirable that the independence 
and neutrality of any small States thus created should 
be secured by being guaranteed by all the Great 
Powers, and we may hope that one result of this war 
will be to ensure a greater respect for such guarantees, 
since it has been shown that they cannot be violated 
with impunity. Only if this is to be the case, the States 
so guaranteed must be founded on just and natural 
principles and the guarantees must be given frankly 



96 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

and without any suspicion of a lurking desire to gain 
some selfish advantage. 

Open and Public Diplomacy. 
The other great cause of war, the fear of powerful 
neighbours, would largely disappear if we had complete 
openness and publicity in all diplomatic and defensive 
arrangements. In a civilised society of individuals 
secret arrangements concerning the property or personal 
safety of a third party are in themselves regarded as 
penal, even though such intentions may not be carried 
into effect. Such secret arrangements between nations 
should be regarded as a violation of the social code of 
nations, and in the future Council of the Nations the 
deliberations and negotiations should be public, and 
any secret arrangements as between its several members 
regarded as an offence against civilisation. 

A Council of the Nations. 
The very existence of a Council of the Nations 
which had the smallest chance of life would itself 
condemn the system of " The Balance of Power," 
for the reasons which have been explained in the 
second part of this handbook. Any plan of securing 
peace by the mere competition in instruments of 
war between two parties is bound in the end to 
break down. The Balance of Power in reality means 
the struggle of one party to be stronger than the 
other, for the simple reason that it is impossible exactly 
to calculate the strength of the other party, and there 
will always be a tendency for each party to give itself 
the benefit of the doubt by tilting the balance in its 
favour ; and as each cannot be stronger than the other, 
the system implies an attempt to achieve what is a 
physical impossibility. The real basis of European 
civilisation should be not a group of three or" four 
Powers confronting^another group of three or four, 
but the whole six "or eight agreeing together that 
aggression or wrong-doing by any one of the units 



—AND THE PEACE 97 

would immediately range the whole forces of the 
remainder against that one troublesome member. 
This is the principle of civilised society within the 
frontier, and it must be the principle which shall 
guide the organisation of the future society of nations. 

It is not at all probable that any very thorough 
organisation of international society can be brought 
into being all at once. But the existence of any 
permanent Council or Conference for the discussion of 
international affairs, and of any disputes that may 
arise, will have a very important effect. Not only do 
questions which arouse very bitter feelings so long as 
each party is looking only at its own side of the case 
often prove quite easy of adjustment when both sides 
of it come to be discussed calmly and reasonably in a 
general conference where each party is compelled to 
appeal to the general sense of justice and therefore to 
state his case in moderate and reasonable terms ; but 
the mere fact of such a Council existing and such 
discussions taking place will go a long way towards 
making the nations realise that they do indeed form 
a community having common interests. The growth 
of respect for international law which is ably traced in 
the last volume of The Cambridge Modern History is 
evidence of the fact that even in the present unorganised 
condition of the world this feeling of common interests 
and a common conscience has been gradually gaining 
ground, and everything which tends to foster this 
consciousness has a value altogether beyond its 
immediate practical effects. Moreover, if the delibera- 
tions or discussions of such a Council are public, the 
interest of the peoples in international affairs will be 
greatly stimulated and they will make a greater effort 
to understand the questions raised. 

Three Essential Points. 

One gets, therefore, three main propositions as the 
framework of this future international society : 

1. A real Council of all the Nations. 



98 PROBLEMS OF THE WAR 

2. Publicity and openness in the deliberations of that 
Council. 

3. The form of government of each nation, and of 
every part of each nation, to be decided by the people 
governed. 

Having established these fundamental propositions, 
we should then be on the road to render possible an 
agreement as to the reduction of armaments, some 
means of enforcing the decisions of the international 
Council, and other rules for the civilised society so 
created. We shall in fact be within measurable dis- 
tance of that change in the evolution of international 
affairs indicated by Mr. Asquith in a passage of his 
Dublin speech with which we may very fittingly close 
this handbook : 

" I should like, if I might for a moment, beyond 
this enquiry into causes and motives, to ask your 
attention and that of my fellow-countrymen to the 
end which in this war we ought to keep in view. Forty- 
four years ago, at the time of the war of 1870, Mr. 
Gladstone used these words. He said : 

" ' The greatest triumph of our time will be the 

enthronement of the idea of public right as the 

governing idea of European politics.' 

" Nearly fifty years have passed ; little progress, it 

seems, has yet been made towards that good and 

beneficent change ; but it seems to me to be now, at 

this moment, as good a definition as we can have of 

our European policy. 

" ' The idea of public right.' What does it mean, 
when translated into concrete terms ? It means, first 
and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite 
repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in 
the relation of States and of the future moulding of 
the European world. It means, next, that room must 
be found and kept for the independent existence and 
free development of the smaller nationalities — each, 
for the life of history, a corporate consciousness of its 



—AND THE PEACE 99 

own. Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, and the 
Scandinavian countries, Greece and the Balkan States. 
They must be recognised as having exactly as good a 
title as their more powerful neighbours — more powerful 
in strength and in wealth — exactly as good a title to a 
4 place in the sun.' It means, finally, or it ought to 
mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the 
substitution for force, for the clash of competing 
ambitions, for groupings and alliances, the substitution 
for all these things of a real European partnership, 
based on the recognition of equal right and established 
and enforced by the common will. 

44 A year ago that would have sounded like a Utopian 
idea. It is probably one that may not or will not be 
realised either to-day or to-morrow. If and when this 
war is decided in favour of the Allies, it will at once 
come within the range, and before long within the 
grasp, of European statesmanship." 



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